The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has upheld the justifiability of the increasingly frequent responses and complaints by citizens and consumer movements against the "duty" to provide their personal data, including their unique personal identification numbers, to shop assistants when making complaints or returning goods. The Commissioner said requesting of such data from citizens is not only controversial from the aspect of purpose and unethical, but also unlawful.

The Commissioner recalled he had warned the Ministry of Finance as early as three years ago such data processing was inadmissible and suggested that it amended without delay the secondary legislation which was the "basis" for such processing. In that regard, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:

"Article 42 of the Serbian Constitution guarantees protection of personal data and stipulates that processing of personal data must be regulated by the law. The fact that the basis for processing of such data can be determined exclusively by the law and not by any other subordinate enactment has been reaffirmed in the proceedings initiated on the Commissioner's proposal by a special decision of the Constitutional Court of Serbia.

No law stipulates the citizens' duty to provide their identity documents when making complaints about goods and services or returning purchased goods, i.e. to give to shop assistants any personal data, least of all such complex data as the unique personal identification number.

Such "duty" is not even stipulated by the Regulation on Introduction of Fiscal Cash Registers (and even if it was, it would not be compliant with the Constitution and the law). That "duty" has been introduced by nothing more than a form marked NI – Order for Correction, which was at one point decreed by the then Minister of Finance and Economy when he passed the Bylaw on the Manner of Making Corrections on the basis of this Regulation and which became an integral part of the Bylaw.

Such a situation when citizens are asked to provide their identity documents, to give their personal data and to provide their signatures, although it should be sufficient for a citizen to have a fiscal slip when replacing goods or making complaints, is quite obviously problematic, both from the aspect of effectiveness and from the aspect of ethics, and both shop assistants and consumers quite understandably recognize it as inappropriate and unpleasant. A particular problem is the fact that shop assistant are still forced to insist on it, because otherwise they risk being penalized of tax authorities.

Such degradation of the basis for processing of personal data from the level of the law to the level of a form made possible mass personal data processing which is very risky from the aspect of potential abuses. But even regardless of that, such data processing without a valid legal basis is certainly inadmissible and unlawful. This is why it is really high time the Ministry of Finance made regulatory arrangements and practice compliant with constitutional and legal arrangements for personal data protection."