06-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
Major US business lobby group joins fight to protect multinationals' GDPR rights after court ruling on Eaton worker data
The Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America filed a court document last week expressing concern over a US court ordering power-system giant Eaton to turn over employee performance evaluations to the IRS, despite the documents being protected by EU data-privacy rules.
The 300,000-member strong lobby group said the documents were of 'marginal relevance' to the IRS's ongoing audit of Eaton. The document also filed by the US National Association of Manufacturers said the American tax agency could have gotten 'the information it wanted another way'.
The Chamber expressed its concern that the US court's decision would make it 'too easy' for the IRS and other American government agencies to force companies to provide information protected by foreign law. It was worried that this could expose taxpayers to penalties and sanctions from other countries.
'The district court's dismissive treatment of the foreign privacy interests also puts Eaton in a bind,' the Chamber wrote.
'If Eaton is forced to turn over the GDPR-protected employee evaluations, it may face enforcement actions in Europe. Eaton presumably could not defend itself by arguing that the GDPR is overly protective or that a US court viewed the privacy interests in the evaluations as minor.'
The Chamber called for the court's judgment to be reversed.
In May, an American judge instructed Eaton to disregard GDPR rules and hand over controversial employee-performance evaluations to the IRS, following a long-running legal dispute.
The IRS hopes to use the evaluations to judge how much work Irish-based staff were doing on some of Eaton's intellectual property, potentially showing whether Eaton was being taxed correctly or not.
The case stems from an IRS audit of Eaton's 2017-2019 tax returns, which focused on whether the company improperly shifted IP to Ireland, where corporate tax rates are lower.
