Committee members are strongly critical of Revenue over accounts

The Office of the Revenue Commissioners was criticised strongly by members of the Dail's Committee of Public Accounts about its attempts to discover the number of bogus non-resident accounts at AIB.

The chairman of the committee, Mr Jim Mitchell, TD, (Fine Gael) said he was "very disappointed with the attempts of the Revenue" to pursue the issue with AIB.

Mr Mitchell said he could not understand why the Revenue did not attempt to collect declarations by people who claimed they were non-residents to the bank and see if they were valid.

He said these could have been checked against the Revenue's own records to see if they were valid and prosecutions could follow.

Several members of the committee said they could not understand why, if the Revenue discovered a small number of cases in 1991, it did not attempt to assess the scale of the overall problem.

Mr Mitchell said in the letter from the senior tax inspector Mr D.A. MacCarthaigh, published in Magill, reference was made to prosecutions of the bank and some officials but no prosecutions took place.

"Was that an empty threat; why say that if you didn't even follow up later on?".

Mr Quigley said there was no "point in just accumulating paper" and it was the obligation of the banks to check the validity of declarations made by those claiming to be non-resident.

"It is a self-policing system put in place by the Oireachtas," he added. He said it would be hard for the Revenue to "get behind the declarations to see if they were true".

Mr Sean Doherty, TD, (Fianna Fail) said "a simple phone call" could establish whether a declaration was truthful or not. Mr Doherty also questioned why the Revenue had not contacted the internal auditor of AIB in 1991, Mr Anthony Spollen.

Mr Pat Rabbitte, TD, (Democratic Left) said the documents from AIB indicated that the Revenue was aware of the "practice" of holding bogus non-resident accounts in 1991, but yet there was no follow-up to see how large this practice was.

Mr Quigley said the Revenue did not have the power to trawl through the accounts and said declarations would not be much use in finding out the scale of the problem.

Mr Mitchell said the number of declarations coming from one town, Tralee, for instance, should have alerted the Revenue that something was wrong.

Mr Quigley revealed that, while the issue of non-resident accounts was discussed by the board of the Revenue during 1991, no minutes of those meetings were taken.