The Turkish Competition Authority dismisses a professional association’s objections to an on-site inspection and refuses to return or destroy data copied from personal mobile devices

1. Text of the case comment

This article examines the Turkish Competition Board’s (“Board”) IYMMO decision^[1] (“Decision”), wherein the Board assessed the objections of the Istanbul Chamber of Sworn-in Certified Public Accountants (“IYMMO”), the professional chamber organizing the senior, publicly regulated tier of the Turkish accountancy profession, against an on-site inspection conducted at its premises, and IYMMO’s request for the return and irreversible destruction of all digital copies obtained, including forensic images taken from the personal mobile devices of its board members and employees. The Board unanimously rejected the request, holding that the inspection complied with Article 15 of Law No. 4054 on the Protection of Competition (“Law No. 4054”), which governs the Turkish Competition Authority’s (“Authority”) dawn raid powers. The Decision consolidates the Board’s position on (i) whether public professional organizations may be inspected, (ii) the examination of personal mobile devices, (iii) inspection powers versus data protection law, (iv) professional secrecy defences, and (v) the constitutionality of Article 15.

2. Background

The Board launched a fully-fledged investigation against 65 undertakings active in the accounting, tax, independent audit and consultancy markets concerning alleged price fixing, customer allocation, no-poach agreements and labour-market information exchange contrary to Article 4 of Law No. 4054. The investigation was merged with an earlier one and the Board authorized the use of its information-request and inspection powers under Articles 14 and 15 of Law No. 4054 in respect of undertakings and associations of undertakings in the relevant sectors.

Within this framework, on 4 February 2026 the Authority’s case handlers inspected IYMMO’s premises in Istanbul. Having presented their authorization certificates and IDs and explained the scope of Article 15, they examined, accompanied by the relevant individuals, the computers, e-mail accounts and mobile devices containing data belonging to the association. The documents taken were recorded on hash-verified DVDs; the forensic data extracted from mobile devices was irreversibly wiped at the end of the inspection, with a Secure Data Deletion Report; the minutes and copies were handed to IYMMO.

3. IYMMO’s objections

IYMMO petitioned the Authority shortly afterwards, arguing in essence that: (i) the inspection power is confined to undertakings and associations of undertakings suspected of an infringement, whereas IYMMO is a non-commercial, non-profit professional organization with public institution status; (ii) the basis and nature of the inspection were unclear; (iii) forensic copies were taken from the personal phones of board members and three employees without a judicial order and without segregating personal from professional data, in breach of the principle of proportionality and of Articles 13, 20, 22 and 36 of the Turkish Constitution; (iv) IYMMO’s data contains professional secrets relating to taxpayers, third parties and the public, subject to a strict confidentiality regime under Law No. 3568 on Certified Public Accountancy and Sworn-in Certified Public Accountancy (“Law No. 3568“), for which no safeguards were provided during the inspection and (v) much of the copied material comprised personal data and communications unconnected to any market conduct; hence outside the inspection’s permissible scope. IYMMO accordingly requested the immediate return and permanent deletion of all copies taken from personal mobile devices.

4. The board’s assessment

4.1 Public professional bodies as associations of undertakings

The Board recalled that Article 3 of Law No. 4054 defines an association of undertakings as any association, with or without legal personality, formed by undertakings to attain particular goals; neither the pursuit of profit nor public-law status is relevant, as confirmed by its finding that TOBB, the umbrella organization of Turkish chambers of commerce, is such an association^[2]. Since IYMMO’s members are sworn-in certified public accountants independently carrying out economic activity, and thus undertakings, and the Chamber regulates and disciplines the profession, IYMMO qualifies as an association of undertakings and may lawfully be inspected under Article 15.

4.2 Legal basis and scope

The Board dismissed the claim that the inspection lacked a discernible basis, noting that it rested on the authorization in the 29 January 2026 decision, which expressly covered associations of undertakings in the relevant sectors. As to mobile devices, the Board relied on Article 15(1)(a) of Law No. 4054, as amended in 2020 by Law No. 7246, which empowers case handlers to examine and copy all kinds of data and documents kept in physical and electronic media and information systems. The inspection minutes, signed by IYMMO’s Chairman, recorded the persons and electronic environments examined and confirmed that they contained data belonging to the association.

4.3 Personal data exemption

On the absence of data segregation, the Board observed that whether an item is personal or undertaking data can only be determined by examining it, and that the legislature deliberately declined to carve personal data out of the scope of Article 15, since anticompetitive correspondence is by nature conducted by natural persons. Invoking its JPMorgan/Citibank precedent^[3], the Board held that data processing by public authorities exercising supervisory duties falls within the exemption in Article 28(2)(c) of Law No. 6698 on the Protection of Personal Data (“KVKK”), Türkiye’s general data protection statute, so the right to request erasure under Article 11(e) KVKK cannot be asserted against the Authority.

4.4 Professional secrecy

While Article 43(1) of Law No. 3568 prohibits accountancy professionals and their staff from disclosing information and secrets learned through their work, Article 43(3) expressly excludes “any kind of judicial or administrative examination or investigation” from that prohibition. The Board accordingly held that secrecy cannot be invoked against a competition inspection. IYMMO could, however, submit trade secret designations under Communiqué No. 2010/3 on the Regulation of the Right of Access to the File and Protection of Trade Secrets, the procedural avenue for protecting confidential business information in seized material.

4.5 The constitutional dimension

The Board relied on the Constitutional Court’s judgment of 6 November 2025 (E.2023/174, K.2025/224), delivered in abstract “norm review” proceedings testing the statute itself and upholding the constitutionality of Article 15 of Law No. 4054. The Court found that the inspection power serves the constitutional objective of ensuring the sound functioning of markets under Article 167 of the Turkish Constitution and is confined to the Board’s statutory duties, exercised by authorized experts; that, since infringements take diverse and unforeseeable forms which the legislature cannot regulate in advance, the necessity of an inspection is for the Board to assess on the facts of each case; that the Board has no autonomous coercive power, compulsion requiring a criminal peace judge’s decision where the inspection is obstructed or likely to be.

The judgment is significant against the backdrop of the Constitutional Court’s’ earlier Ford Automotive judgment, rendered on an individual^[4] constitutional complaint by an inspected company, in which the Court’s Plenary had found that an on-site inspection conducted on the Board’s authorization alone, without a judge’s order or subsequent judicial approval, violated the inviolability of the domicile under Article 21 of the Constitution, located the defect in Article 15 itself and referred the matter to the legislature. Ford Automotive had fuelled expectations of a legislative overhaul of the inspection regime; encouraging undertakings to raise constitutional objections against dawn raids. The recent norm-review judgment, and the Board’s reliance on it here, suggest that this constitutional challenge has, for now, lost much of its practical force and that inspections will continue on Board authorization alone pending legislative intervention.

5. Conclusion

The Decision confirms the breadth of the Authority’s inspection powers and the limited traction of the defences most commonly raised against them. The public-law status, the personal character of mobile devices, data protection legislation and sectoral secrecy regimes were all held unavailing. Objections to the manner of an inspection are best preserved through simultaneous reservations in the inspection minutes and pursued through an annulment action, the judicial review route for Board decisions, before the Ankara administrative courts within 60 days of notification of the reasoned decision. Read with the investigation’s labour-market dimension, the Decision signals that professional service markets and the associations that organize them remain within the Authority’s enforcement priorities.

[1]Decision of the Board dated 12.03.2026 and numbered 26-09/270-96.

[2]Decision of the Board dated 26.05.2011 and numbered 11-32/663-206 (TOBB).

[3]Decision of the Board dated 23.06.2022 and numbered 22-28/455-184 (JPMorgan/Citibank).

[4] Turkish Constitutional Court, Ford Otomotiv Sanayi A.Ş., Plenary, App. No. 2019/40991, 23.03.2023, Official Gazette 20.06.2023, No. 32227

Originally published in Concurrences