German Court fines an Employer €5,000 for delaying response to data access request

The Dusseldorf Labour Court has fined an employer €5000 for delaying a response to a Data Access Request under Article 15 of the GDPR, and not fully answering the request.

The data subject made a whole host of complaints in respect of the employer, and much of the claim was dismissed, however the Düsseldorf Labour Court made a point of stating that the data subject was entitled to have their request dealt with within the timeframe set out in the GDPR.

The fine was calculated on the basis of € 500 each for the first two months of the delay, € 1,000 each for the next three months and the employer was further fined € 500 each for two content-related deficiencies in the information, Namely, that in addition to providing an indexed dossier of information, the employer should also have answered 2 of the questions raised by the data subject in their request.

The judgement can be found here.