Britain’s Information Commissioner Office (ICO) will from now on retain the accumulated sum as penalties to meet legal expenses. All these days, the estimated income per annum as GDPR fines were hitting £17 million or 4% of annual turnover and were being diverted into the government’s consolidated fund.
But from now, as per the new agreement made with the Treasury and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (the ICO will keep DCMS), an amount of £8 million to meet the litigation costs accrued from litigation expenses.
It has to be notified over here that over 90% of ICO funding is paid by organizations operating in the UK as a data protection fee. And the year 2021 witnessed a figure of £45 million as fees paid by businesses.
Thus, from now on, a part of the accumulated money as fees will be kept aside to mobilize authorities to improve their ability to defend the organization in the court of law.
For the year 2020-2021, the ICO could only collect around 26% of fines from £42 million pronounced in the said financial year. Meaning it is failing by over 50% in recovering penalties from companies.
There is a high probability that ICO might approach a new legal syndicate in resolving the pending penal issues.
