Tax defaulters and medics

Sir, – David McCabe (Letters, July 1st) suggests the State makes no payments to medical consultants without production of a tax clearance certificate, as is practised in other businesses.

Let me assure Mr McCabe that this requirement already extends to medical consultants. Not alone have I a tax clearance certificate, but I am tax-compliant.

However, there will always be people who ignore the law and try to cheat the Revenue. The responsibility is a personal one, not a group one. So, while it may be appropriate for a representative organisation to exhort its members to obey the law, such an exhortation can only be exerted as a social pressure.

Tax matters are, indeed, private – unless one is a defaulter, when public contempt is appropriate. I do not accept that individual transgressors should bring an entire professional group into disrepute. – Yours, etc, Prof PATRICK K PLUNKETT Consultant in emergency medicine, St James’s Hospital, Dublin 8.

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Sir – David McCabe (Letters, July 1st) advises the Irish Hospital Consultants Association to encourage its members to pay their taxes and thereby avoid the “deeply embarrassing” scenario of being listed as tax defaulters among “fast food outlets, car dealers, landlords and clothing wholesalers”.

And I thought the shame was in being listed at all – regardless of the possible unsavouriness or otherwise of the fellow defaulters. – Yours, etc, CATHERINE ROANTREE Baltimore, Co Cork.