Eaton Can’t Shield Irish Employees’ Performance Reviews From IRS

Eaton Corp. must comply with IRS requests for performance reviews of international employees, a federal appeals court ruled.

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the ruling requiring Eaton Corp. to produce employee reviews from an Irish affiliate, over arguments that doing so would violate Europe’s broad data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation.

The lower court properly analyzed the international comity interests at stake, and properly determined that the US interest in obtaining the data for tax collection pourposes took precedence over Ireland’s “minimal” interest in shielding the information.

The requested data was “mainly about ...