Conference Agenda

Impartial tax administration is fundamental to public trust, the lawfulness of authorities, and economic stability. However, emerging digital technologies risk entrenching bias in historically divergent legal systems. This study undertakes a comparative analysis of the legal frameworks and case law governing the impartiality of tax officers in Algeria and Slovenia. The two countries are selected to examine the impact of different regulatory and organizational frameworks on tax administration performance within various economic, political, and legal contexts. This paper explores how historical legacies and digital innovations can reshape administrative fairness. As tax systems increasingly adopt algorithmic decision-making, safeguarding procedural equity becomes critical, yet remains underexplored, particularly across divergent legal traditions.

By juxtaposing Algeria’s post-colonial system—rooted in French legal transplants—with Slovenia’s EU-integrated framework, based on Austro-Hungarian administrative law, this research bridges post-colonial and post-socialist governance paradigms. Through a comparative legal analysis of constitutional provisions, administrative codes, and case law, supplemented by theories of Europeanization and digital governance, the study reveals striking contrasts. Slovenia’s hybrid human-AI audit model, bolstered by EU-mandated transparency (e.g., Article 41 of the EU Charter) and rigorous judicial review, more effectively mitigates bias than Algeria’s nascent digital system, which prioritizes efficiency over procedural safeguards.

Case law underscores this divergence: Slovenia’s Administrative and Supreme Courts proactively enforce conflict-of-interest standards, whereas Algeria’s Conseil d'État struggles with institutional constraints, reflecting entrenched historical paths. Policy implications suggest that Algeria should adopt judicial oversight mechanisms for AI-driven audits, while Slovenia should enhance algorithmic transparency. The study proposes a “Mediterranean Charter” to harmonize MENA-EU tax governance, balancing technological efficiency with equity. By integrating Weberian bureaucratic rigor with contemporary digital governance challenges, this research seeks to contribute novel insights into mitigating bias in increasingly digitized administrations, offering a template for cross-regional legal adaptation.

Digitalisation has become a key component of modern public administrations, and, consequently, constitutes a landmark in current legal relationships between citizens and public authorities. Administrative procedures are flooded with digital solutions to achieve more efficiency and accessibility. However, a gap often emerges between the speed at which public services are digitalised and the ability of many citizens to adapt to and understand these technologies. Even when authorities attempt to nudge citizens toward certain digital behaviours, resistance can remain strong if individuals do not trust the solutions provided.

This research aims to explore the set of principles which public authorities should follow when offering digital solutions in administrative procedures. These principles may be brought together under an umbrella term: “the right to trust digital solutions in administrative procedures”. The proposed right is not monolithic but inherently multidimensional. It draws from several fundamental values and legal principles, including transparency, accountability, neutrality, security, and privacy. The paper proposes four conceptual pillars that define this right:

(1) the right to understand digital administrative procedures, including how algorithms work and decisions are made;

(2) the right to neutrality, which encompasses both infrastructure-level neutrality (e.g., Internet neutrality and platform independence) and algorithmic neutrality, with a particular focus on the risk of bias in automated decision-making;

(3) the right to security, focusing on reliable and safe digital public services, especially in systems outsourced to private providers;

(4) and the right to privacy, which includes the ethical and lawful management of personal data.

The last two elements can be linked more deeply because both relate to good data management, even if they may target it from different angles.

The study engages with current European legal instruments (such as the GDPR, the NIS2 Directive, and Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), as well as comparative practices across EU Member States. It emphasises the need to assess algorithmic bias in automated procedures and questions whether legal safeguards can ensure that public digital infrastructures and decisions remain neutral, lawful, and inclusive. This research also reflects on the institutional responsibilities of public authorities: how they educate and assist citizens in navigating digital services, the implications of relying on Big Tech platforms for public communication, and the limits of legal remedies in digital contexts.

Furthermore, the research aims to find the necessary legal framework and the practical approaches for safeguarding citizens' rights in the context of digitalising administrative procedures. Finally, the paper assesses whether these components can coherently fall under a single conceptual framework, and whether that framework should evolve towards administrative law principles or develop into a new (fundamental) “right to digital public administration".

According to the Weberian bureaucratic model, civil servants enjoy a set of rights designed to ensure their impartiality. In particular, they receive a stable position, with an internal career path and a predetermined remuneration, which must be sufficiently high to prevent the distortion of the rational use of legal power, that is to prevent corruption and other illegal conduct. By and large, every organizational theory pays some attention to remuneration, which is seen as a key element in ensuring the impartiality, the independence and the expertise of civil servants.

Moving from theory to practice, the regulatory landscape of the civil service systems in the world tends to confirm such theoretical premises: both international organizations (IOs) and State entities have outlined some procedural and substantive rules governing the remuneration of their public officials, as to guarantee their impartiality.

One of the best-known criteria in place at the international level is the so-called “Noblemaire principle”, which entails that, on the one hand, international employees shall get equal pay for work of equal value, whatever their nationality or the salaries earned in their home countries; on the other hand, it prescribes that, in recruiting staff from their full membership, IOs shall offer pay able to draw and keep citizens of countries where salaries are the highest.

When it comes to State entities, generally there are two problems to cope with: first, it is necessary to clarify when a remuneration is “sufficiently high”; second, it is crucial to determine, between the central government and the local ones, who is in charge of quantifying the remuneration of public officials. In other words, in multi-level legal systems, central governments seek to set out a uniform remuneration for everyone, whereas the local governments seek to retain such competence for themselves.

The European civil service encompasses both the supranational officials working at the EU bodies and the national civil servants employed by the Member States. In this regard, it shares some characteristics with both the IOs and the State entities: looking at the former, it seeks to address the geographical and economic imbalances still in place within the EU; looking at the latter, it has progressively started to set out administrative principles in order to ensure a sufficiently high remuneration at local level, so to say, for national officials.

The paper aims to examine such features in place within the EU, by seeking an answer to the following questions:

1) How does the Union ensure a sufficiently high remuneration at supranational level?

2) What are the powers granted to the Union to ensure a sufficiently high remuneration at national level? In other words, has the Union the power to harmonize the public salaries at local level?

3) Which branches of national administrations are the most interested by such a “competence creep”?

To tackle such questions, the analysis takes advantage of the legal comparison, on the one hand, with international civil service systems and, on the other hand, with federal/regional State entities with similar features.

One of the central concepts of public administration is the administrative body as a public administration entity endowed with decision-making power. Their decision-making profoundly affects various areas of social activity and can create many opportunities and difficulties for their addressees. Therefore, trust in the proper setting up and functioning of administrative bodies is crucial.

Important aspects contributing to the creation of trust in administrative decision-making include the manner in which the administrative authority makes decisions. There are two basic principles of administrative decision-making, depending on how the will of the administrative authority is structured. We speak then of monocratic and collegial administrative bodies. While both of these "types" of administrative bodies have their problems, this paper focuses on the pitfalls that accompany collegial administrative bodies' decision-making.

A collegial body is represented by a number of persons whose opinions, after mutual weighing (voting), form a joint will when making decisions in various areas of (not only) public administration. The theoretical rationale for promoting collective decision-making lies in the higher level of expertise, the higher level of trust in the decisions taken jointly and, last but not least, the higher level of objectivity in decision-making, which is supposed to be free from subjective interests of individuals or corrupt behaviour. Nevertheless, are these assumptions not illusory?

In practice, there are several concepts of the functioning of collegial bodies which may or may not meet the expectations of society or the legislature in terms of fulfilling the stated premises. We consider the problems arising in their decision-making to be universal, arising across legal orders and systems. However, this paper refers to the Czech legal enviroment for the purpose of demonstrating some of the practical struggles associated with collective decision-making. Thus, this paper aims to analyse the legal framework, the principles of functioning and the significance of collegial bodies and collective decision-making from the position of administrative bodies as state administration authorities. In particular, the focus will be on potential bias in the formation of the collective will of the administrative body at different stages of decision-making. In order to demonstrate the fulfilment of the objectives of the functioning of the collegial bodies, cases from the Czech legal environment will be presented, which range on the edges of a broad spectrum of (in)correct setting of collective decision-making processes. We will thus touch upon the topics of collective decision-making in the field of public investment, administrative offences, where a special collegial body of a municipality can process specific types of administrative offences or appeals boards, which assess the appeal in the case where the central administrative authority decides on the appeal.