The Justice Ministry is preparing major changes to the verification of people in debt. The Justice Ministry is sticking to the date implied by the National Debtors Register Act of December 6, 2018. – and as it assures – the registry is expected to become operational as early as July 2021. The main difference between it and other such databases and debtor registries will be its accessibility and full publicity.
In the legal community, the idea raises a number of controversies, such as issues related to the protection of sensitive data, or those related to people with loans in francs (they may appear in the registry).
The database will be able to verify, among other things, natural persons, legal entities, companies, entrepreneurs against whom there are or have been proceedings for a ban on business activity, partners of partnerships, or alimony debtors (if they are in arrears with payment for more than 3 months)
An important role, as indicated by counsel Maciej Gawronski, will be played by the period of disclosure of such data in the database.
The data should not be processed or kept longer than necessary for the purposes for which it was collected – It seems that if the alimony debtor has paid everything, it would be appropriate to delete it or make the entry inaccessible to the public.
There is also a great deal of discussion about the planned provision and its compliance with RODO.
Simply searching “by PESEL” will not violate RODO. First of all, there is a statutory basis for this, and secondly, the PESEL number is in common use and serves precisely to uniquely identify people in Poland. However, in the KRZ it will be possible to check the “purity” of any person from a debt collection perspective. This is because you can enter any PESEL and it will come out something or nothing. And in this regard, the legislator, when drafting the law, should carry out a data protection impact assessment, and this has not been done,” says Counselor Gawronski.
You can read more about the plans to amend the National Debt Register regulations here.
