The Georgian Dream parliament has expedited the consideration of a draft law, through which the Government Administration will be granted unlimited access to tax and personal data, including special category data, kept in public institutions. The draft law was submitted to the parlaimantary bureau on November 10, and within two days, it was adopted in three readings in an expedited manner.

The explanatory note mentions support for the activities of the Government Efficiency Department as the need for the legislative amendment. According to the initiator of the amendments: “Control of the execution of decisions by officials, as well as assessment of compliance, economy, productivity, efficiency and transparency, preparation of recommendations and proposals will be simplified.”

According to the amendments, a new entry has been added to the Law on Personal Data Protection, which makes the Government Administration one of the bodies that is directly, without any additional barriers, granted the authority by law to request information containing, among others, tax secrets or personal data (including special category data) from executive authorities, legal entities under public law, state enterprises, and non-commercial legal entities.

Allowing the Government Administration to access special category personal data of this scale cannot be justified solely by controlling the effectiveness of the activities of executive authorities. It is alarming that the Government Administration has access to all types of personal information without anyone, including the court, controlling the necessity and need for processing the data. It is impossible to determine what type of information the Government Administration will process under the pretext of assessing the “effectiveness of its activities.”

It is noteworthy that the Government Efficiency Department was established in 2025 on the basis of the Internal Audit Department of the Government Administration. Accordingly, immediately after the establishment of the service, it was clear that this was not related to any new needs or functions and that only the name of the Government Administration’s structural unit was changed for propaganda purposes. In addition to the Internal Audit Department of the Government Administration, the State Audit Service also exists in the Georgian legislative space, the purpose of which is to “promote the efficiency and accountability of public administration, the legality, appropriateness and effectiveness of the use and expenditure of budgetary funds and other public resources, the protection of national wealth, the property of the state, autonomous republics and municipalities, as well as the improvement of public finance management”. The uncontrolled access of the Government Administration to personal data/tax secrecy has nothing to do with the control of the effectiveness of executive bodies. Such a function, in accordance with the Georgian legislation, had already been assigned to both the independent state audit and internal audit services. By granting the Efficiency Department and the Government Administration in general uncontrolled access to information kept in public institutions, Georgian Dream is taking another step towards authoritarianism, making the country’s governance system even more centralized, where decisions will not be made in accordance with democratic principles, and the activities and decisions of all public bodies will be directly controlled by Irakli Kobakhidze.

Trust in the processing of personal information by the Government Administration is also undermined by the fact that the Personal Data Protection Service, in fact, does not respond to the cases of personal data breaches by state agencies and leaves even this legislative change, which unjustifiably grants the Government Administration access to a huge amount of data, without assessment. However, the service has important functions: checking (inspecting) the legality of data processing in public and private institutions, supervising the implementation of legislation regulating the protection of personal data, informing the public about the state of data protection and important developments related to it. To fulfill these functions, the Personal Data Protection Service is obliged to be more active and respond to important changes that directly affect its field of activity.