Email won't respond unless I give certain info in order to be GDPR-compliant - is this GDPR-relevant?

From the point of view of your organization, knowing how you are related to the company helps them to address your inquiry to the corrected person. In fact, from the perspective of Access Policy, HR staff cannot access or deal with customers, while the customer care service shall not deal with employees' requests.So their request makes sense from this perspective.

Here you can find more information on the impact of GDPR on HR management

• How the GDPR could impact your HR department: https://advisera.com/eugdpracademy/blog/2018/02/22/how-the-gdpr-could-impact-your-hr-department/

If you need to understand how to comply with GDPR requirements in the workplace, you can consider enrolling in our free training EU GDPR Foundations course: https://advisera.com/training/eu-gdpr-foundations-course//

Thank you very much for your reply, Alessandra. I really appreciate you taking the time. However, I am still unsure it is information they should be requesting (owing to the longer version of my query), that they would require my status, as the issues at hand weren't about a particular individual or individuals, but rather the company as a whole - and I am afraid that if I say I am an employee they will find a way to twist their response or even attempt to seek me out. All the same, at least I know how to best structure my response to them going forward - I was just wondering if they were hiding behind GDPR as an excuse, you see. Now that that part is at least out of the way, that helps me going forward.

Thank you again so much for your time! 

In your first question, you stated that they can find that you are an employee from the content of your complaint so that they can discover it without asking you. The consequences arising from your complaint may differ from your contract and your home labor law but do not involve GDPR. Depending on how sensitive your allegation and complaint are, I would suggest you talk to a lawyer to get a better consultation over your concrete situation.From the perspective of GDPR compliance, it is a common procedure to confirm identity in order to handle correctly a data subject access request.