Failure to sign the personal-data form

Failure to sign the personal-data form is a formal irregularity that can be cured.

That is the excellent result achieved before the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio. By order no. 08034/2016 of 16 December 2016 the Third Division of the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio "allowed the interim application made by the applicant and accordingly suspended the effect of the challenged act, ordering the Administration to include the applicant herself in the ranking, with reservation, on the basis of the score obtained, and the consequent admission to the degree course and the filing of that ranking". The Administrative Court held that failure to sign the personal-data form constitutes a mere formal irregularity that can be cured and which, as such, does not prejudice the correspondence between the individual personal-data form and the related answer sheet, in effect confirming the presidential interim decree already issued, no. 7293/2016.

Let us take a step back.

The applicant, represented by Attorney Pasquale Trigiante of the Bari Bar, had been excluded from the procedure for admission to the degree course for the training of architects, following her failure to sign the personal-data form; a circumstance which had led to the test being annulled. The purpose of signing the personal-data form is exclusively to draw the candidate's attention to the verification that has taken place of the correspondence between the adhesive labels containing the identification codes affixed to the documentation delivered to him or her. Nor can it be of any relevance that Ministerial Decree 546 of 2016 (unlike the previous decrees), containing the lex specialis of the admission procedure to the degree course in question for the academic year 2016/2017, included an express exclusion clause (and annulment of the test) in the event of failure by the candidate to sign the personal-data form. In substance, failure by the applicant to sign the data contained in the personal-data form, although mandatorily required of the candidate, must be given the mere significance of a formal irregularity which can in no case justify a measure of exclusion from the procedure "pure and simple", and moreover in the absence of any challenge.