Huge fraud on State not considered as a crime

In 1983 the Oireachtas created a criminal offence, which has since been known as a revenue offence. This arises where a person knowingly delivers any incorrect return, statement or accounts in connection with any tax. The offence extended to knowingly aiding or abetting another person to make an incorrect return, statement or accounts on any tax.

The offence could be either a summary offence (i.e. a minor offence trialable in the District Court and subject to a maximum fine of £1,000 or imprisonment for not more than one year); or an indictable offence (i.e. a more serious offence, trialable by jury in a Circuit Court, subject to a fine not exceeding £10,000 and imprisonment not exceeding five years). The 1983 Act also provided that charges for revenue offences could be instituted at any time within 10 years of the commission of the offence.

From recent revelations, we are now all aware that the incidence of revenue offences has been very high, probably 100,000 in any one year in relation to DIRT tax alone. We have also become aware that these offences have been serious and that those who perpetrated them were aided and abetted by thousands of officials in financial institutions. We also know that a huge number of such crimes occurred in the last 10 years and are therefore liable to be the subject of prosecution.

We all know also that the authorities in the Department of Finance and in the Revenue Commissioners were less than fully exercised about the prevalence of these offences and may have helped to cover them up. As a consequence, almost nobody has been convicted of a revenue offence on indictment. Nobody has gone to jail and nobody has been required to pay a fine of anything near £10,000.

A few weeks ago, after the Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, returned from his holidays, the annual report of the Garda Siochana for 1998 was issued. This contains the annual data on crime statistics. It spares no details on the crimes listed. As you might expect it lists murder, manslaughter, the other crimes against the person, the obvious crimes against property and against the State but also, for instance, bigamy (zero in 1998), unlawful seizure of aircraft (zero), cheating (zero), bribery (one), perjury (zero, honest!), pedal cycle offences (108), urinating in public (19), begging (531).

Under the part of the report dealing with non-indictable offences an array of offences is listed with the relevant data attached. This starts with badger-baiting, then cock-fighting, followed by dog-fighting. Then there are offences such as dangerous parking, being illegally on licensed premises during closing hours and then, buried amid such enormities, a reference to revenue offences. These are summary offences. There were 741 prosecutions in 1998 and 319 convictions.

RETURNING to the section of the report dealing with indictable offences, there is not a single mention of revenue offences (i.e. the serious ones, the hundreds of thousands of revenue offences that we have been hearing about). Nothing at all. Not a mention. Not a listing.

This has been the case in Garda annual reports since 1984. Although indictable revenue offences have been on the statute book since then, gardai have failed to notice, not just the vast prevalence of the crime but the fact that it is an indictable crime at all.

Meanwhile, as the prevalence of a vast incidence of revenue crimes has been uncovered, the Minister for Justice, the Department of Justice and gardai have been congratulating themselves on the disappearance of the crime wave that seemingly threatened to engulf us all three years ago. No longer is there a major threat to the fabric of our society as Mr O'Donoghue proclaimed two and a bit years ago. The alarming growth has gone. Obviously the war against crime has been won.

Never mind that tens of thousands of people have been found to have been engaged in massive fraud, aided and abetted by bank officials and ignored by the Revenue Commissioners, there have been fewer burglaries and fewer thefts from cars than three years ago.

That is it: 7,010 burglaries and 5,229 fewer larcenies from cars, which together account for almost three-quarters of the total fall in recorded crime since 1995, the year of the crime wave. Burglaries and thefts from cars are what matter (typically, such crimes involve the theft of property worth less than £200).

If these are down, everything is hunky-dory. It appears not to matter that there are hardly any fewer instances of arson (281, as compared with 286 in 1995); that there are more instances of malicious damage to property (8,223, as compared with 7,721); and that the murder/manslaughter rate is exactly the same (51). The crime wave has gone away because burglaries are down and thefts from cars are down.

AND incidentally, however much he might wish to congratulate himself, Mr O'Donoghue has had nothing at all to do with the fall in the crime figures. Neither, indeed, has his predecessor in office, Nora Owen. All the huffing and puffing about new crime preventive measures, all the legislative changes to the criminal justice system, the constitutional change on bail, all entirely irrelevant to the disappeared crime wave.

Gardai themselves perceived a year ago (in the 1997 report) what was really going on: that the crime levels (in so far as burglaries and thefts from cars are concerned, although they did not draw this distinction) had a great deal to do with levels of prosperity in society generally: when prosperity improved the crime figures declined and vice versa.

But what is going on within the i, Garda, the Department of Justice and in the mind of the Minister for Justice, not to notice that a crime far more serious and far more prevalent than most of the crime recorded in the official statistics has been going on over decades, and that perhaps the official data ought to acknowledge even a little bit that this is so?

Should indictable revenue offences not rate even a listing in the voluminous tables of crime statistics, even if the number of such reported crimes is zero and, obviously, the number of convictions is zero?

It has all to do with mindset. The i, Garda, the Department of Justice, the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Finance and the Central Bank don't really consider massive fraud perpetrated on the State as a crime. Crime is what is perpetrated by the lower classes, apart from a few unfortunate aberrations among the better classes.

The criminal courts and the prisons are for the lower classes, again apart from a few unfortunate aberrations. So embedded is that idea that it has occurred to nobody to list indictable revenue offences even as a potential crime, at a time when the newspapers, radio and television have been full of it.