The state is cracking down hard on the leeches and parasites who fail to pay their way and try to live off other people. In its manifesto for the last general election, Fianna Fail promised that there would be "a zero tolerance policy on all crime".

Out on the mean streets the effects of this new hard line are being felt. As Ian O'Donnell and Eoin O'Sullivan point out in a fine pamphlet published this week, Crime Control in Ireland, prosecutions of beggars have soared. Before 1997, beggars were prosecuted at a rate of 128 a year. Since John O'Donoghue took charge, the rate has risen to 508.

Never mind that the Vagrancy Act under which they are charged was introduced at the time of the Great Famine to stop the starving from embarrassing their betters on the queen's highways.

Never mind that the number of homeless has almost doubled in the same period, thus producing many more vagrants to prosecute. We were promised zero tolerance, and the slogan means what it says. The law, as far as the weak, the desperate and the unconnected are concerned, is the law.

The only problem is that a typographical error must have slipped into the manifesto. How else can the word "all" have found its way into the slogan "zero tolerance on all crime"? For this week it became clear that zero tolerance does not apply to the comfortable classes' crime of choice - tax evasion.

With the Revenue Commissioners announcing a deal under which the holders of bogus non-resident accounts can avoid prosecution, publicity and the full weight of penalties, tolerance for some remains much more than zero. While the beggars pay the price, the well-to-do get to be choosers. The announcement showed that the double standard is alive and well.

Last year more than 600 investigators from the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs carried out 448,000 reviews of claims for social welfare benefit. Savings of £214 million were achieved for the Exchequer from a total social welfare bill of about £5.3 billion.

Nine people were imprisoned for social welfare fraud or abuse, with sentences ranging from 14 days to five months. A further 23 received suspended sentences, and 120 were fined between £10 and £2,000. Six others were ordered to do community service. Another 510 cases are before the courts, and a further 269 cases are with the Chief State Solicitor.

Tax evasion robs the Exchequer of a lot more money than social welfare fraud.

The most recent report of the Comptroller and Auditor General showed that, as of May 31st, 2000, over £1 billion was outstanding in unpaid taxes, and that only half of it was likely to be collected. While social welfare inspectors reviewed nearly 450,000 claims last year, the Revenue carried out just 17,428 audits, down 767 on the year before.

There are, in other words, well over 20 times more checks on social welfare claims than on tax returns. And while people regularly go to jail for social welfare fraud, the jailing of one tax-evader this year was regarded as an extraordinary, even landmark, event.

THE special deal for bogus non-residents is all the more extraordinary because many of them have already ignored two supposedly final warnings. The tax amnesties of 1988 and 1993 were accompanied by fierce admonitions to pay up or face dire consequences. In the latter case, these were to include a mandatory jail sentence.

The 1993 amnesty legislation says that from that point on anyone who "knowingly makes any false statement or false representation" on a tax return or "wilfully aids, abets, assists, incites or induces" anyone else to do so will be liable to a jail sentence of between one and eight years. If the amount of tax evaded is more than £100,000, the jail term is mandatory.

Given the period in which the DIRT scam was at its height, it is likely that very many of those who engaged in it ignored at least one, and perhaps both, of the tax amnesties and made false returns after 1993. Yet both they and the financial institutions which assisted and incited their tax evasion are getting away with it.

This experience, moreover, suggests that even those who continue to ignore this week's rehash of previous dire warnings to comply or else will also get away with it. Since this particular last-chance saloon has no closing time, they might as well have another round.

The deal on offer is, from the Revenue's point of view, a pragmatic one. When they say investigating the full range of bogus accounts would tie up their resources for years, they are undoubtedly right. What goes unsaid is that those resources are plainly inadequate, and that the political will to provide the necessary reinforcements is lacking.

The stark fact is that, for all the public outrage at the scams exposed by the Public Accounts Committee, the tribunals and High Court inspectors, getting away with tax evasion is probably easier than ever.

The most recent Comptroller and Auditor General report, for 1999, shows that the number of income-tax audits carried out by Revenue had fallen every year of the previous five, from 2,625 in 1995 to 1,910 in 1999. The number of corporation tax audits in 1999 was less than half what it was in 1996, with the yield down from £44.4 million to £18.9 million.

The C & AG noted "a reduction in some of the more traditional inquiry work, with increasing pressure on the already small overall number of staff allocated, a substantial reduction in the fieldwork in Dublin and a reduction of eight clerical staff since 1996, no inspector allocated to enquiry work in five of 13 provincial tax districts".

In such circumstances, the Revenue has little choice but to offer inducements to tax-evaders. The subtext of all the threats is still: come clean or the State will have to show its toughness by hammering a few more beggars and dole cheats.