Unpublished tax settlements with Revenue reach €1.36bn
An Were Each Average €1 Ie Laura Worth Settlements For File The Of Picture: Unpublished Top Hutton/rollingnews Around 6m €52 052bn, 20
THE Revenue Commissioners made unpublished tax settlements of more than €1.36bn during the course of last year.
The enormous tax haul related to 62,418 separate disclosures, Revenue said, though more than €1bn of the total related to just a small number of cases.
It said the top 20 unpublished settlements were worth €1.052bn, for an average of about €52.6m each.
That meant the other 62,398 settlements were valued at about €311m, or an average of about €5,000 in each case.
Revenue said it would not provide any further individual detail on the scale of the highest settlements, saying it had concerns over “taxpayer confidentiality”.
It said: "To release the details of the 20 largest settlements by amount could potentially lead to the identification of individual taxpayers.”
The Revenue Commissioners said it had introduced a new compliance intervention framework in May of this year to provide a “consistent graduated response” to taxpayer behaviour.
It said this allowed for a range of actions from extensive opportunities to voluntarily correct mistakes up to the pursuit of criminal sanctions for serious cases of tax evasion.
A spokeswoman said: "Taxpayers who avail of these opportunities will experience the minimum level of penalty and generally not risk either publication or prosecution.”
She said there were several circumstances in which individuals or companies making tax settlements could avoid the published quarterly list of tax defaulters.
This happened where a taxpayer made a qualifying disclosure to Revenue, which included a declaration as well as payment of the tax and interest due for late payment.
She said legislation also allowed that it would not publish cases where the tax settlement figure was less than €50,000, and in other related circumstances.
Cases where a "qualifying avoidance disclosure” was made, or where a tax avoidance surcharge was incurred are also not published, the spokeswoman said.
The spokeswoman added: "All tax settlements are subject to approval by Revenue. A ‘Letter of Acceptance’ will be issued by Revenue in all cases where a ‘Letter of Offer’ from a taxpayer is agreed and approved by Revenue."