Revenue collects €172m from sugar tax, C&AG report reveals
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The sugar tax has brought in €172m in net receipts collected by Revenue between 2018 and 2023, the Office Of The Comptroller & Auditor General (C&AG) found.
Relief from the tax is available to exporters of sugar-sweetened drinks in the form of repayment. This came to €4.4m in those years, the audit found.
However, in some cases, companies claiming repayment waited as long as a year for their case to be assessed and others received repayment despite filing after the Revenue deadlines.
The C&AG found two claims totalling just over €4,000 were submitted six months after the claims deadline but still repaid. The information was manually updated by Revenue staff.
The audit also identified delays to repayments including a claim of €9,000 approved in April 2023 but not paid by April 2024.
Three claims coming to almost €46,000, relating to one taxpayer, received in October/November 2023 were not reviewed by a caseworker until March 2024. The audit found this person had been given two work identification numbers by mistake and did not know about cases assigned to the second number.
A separate claim of €6,300 was reviewed but the correct procedure was not followed to finalise this, so it also had not yet been paid after one year.
Revenue has taken steps to correct these issues, the audit notes. This included a review in July of processes for approving repayment claims and other system changes to be in place by the end of September.
Revenue also carried out 126 interventions in identifying companies which should be paying the tax but were not, up to that point.
The audit states five interventions yielded almost €426,000 including interest and penalties. Some €244,000 came from just one company, while another was also found to be a non-filer for income tax.
The C&AG also said net annual receipts after repayments decreased from €33m in 2019 to €29m in 2023.
This, they indicated, is in line with the objectives of the tax. It is likely due to consumers choosing drinks with lower sugar content and manufacturers reformulating their products to have less sugar, the audit states.