Defective Service Does Not Interrupt the Limitation Period; Action Against a Debt Status Certificate

Hatay 1st Tax Court, 31.03.2026, E. 2025/504, K. 2026/312

It had been seven years since my client left his old address. The administration’s notices were still going to that address, a note was being stuck on the door and “served” was being written in the file. The client knew nothing; time limits were running silently on paper. One day a debt status certificate for TRY 3,463,236.27 appeared before him. The fifteen-day period for suing against the payment orders had long passed.

The Plenary Session of the Tax Chambers had established the case law that where a debt is first learned of through a debt status certificate, an action may be brought against that certificate and the merits of the underlying payment orders may also be reviewed. I sued on the basis of that case law.

The court did not dispose of the file with a formal review; it ran an address search on UYAP, placed the residence address declared by the client since 28.02.2018 next to the address used by the administration, and went through the payment orders one by one. Service to an address that is not in the address registration system, even where a note is stuck on the door, is not in due form and does not interrupt the collection limitation period. As the fifteen-day reasonable interval required by Articles 14 and 102 of the Tax Procedure Law between the two notifications to the legal representative was not observed, the second notification was also defective.

The debts falling due in 2016 to 2019 were thus held to be time-barred; roughly 85 percent of the debt was written off. This decision seems valuable to me for its method before its result; good reasoning is the victory of the law more than of the winning party.