The Revenue Commissioners have directed employers to repay €301.5 million in Covid-era wage subsidies after subjecting them to “audit and compliance” inspections.
The recovery followed checks designed to ensure that employers met the eligibility criteria and used the funds appropriately, the tax authority said.
During the pandemic, which began in early 2020, the Government paid out €10.7 billion in wage subsidies and related benefits to tens of thousands of employers for hundreds of thousands of workers.
The schemes were designed to maintain employment when the public health lockdown closed large parts of the economy. Restrictions were in force throughout Irish society from March 2020 until January 2022.
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It was not until May 2023, after a global vaccination campaign, that the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 no longer an emergency of international concern.
Almost five years after Irish wage schemes closed, the Revenue has said it continued to examine “certain entities” as part of its compliance activity.
The tax authority has recovered almost €257.5 million from employers who were beneficiaries of the employment wage subsidy scheme (EWSS), the largest of two schemes which was introduced in August 2020 at the height of the economic disruption.
The EWSS cost a total of €7.8 billion – €6.8 billion in pay subsidies and about €1 billion in PRSI credits. In all, 51,000 employers claimed subsidies for more than 750,000 workers.
Another €44 million was recovered from employers who participated in the previous temporary wage subsidy scheme (TWSS), the first of the two schemes which came into force in March 2020 shortly after the coronavirus struck. About €2.8 billion was paid to 67,000 employers who employed 690,000 workers.
The €44 million from audit and compliance work on TWSS payments was in addition to another €308 million collected by the Revenue after a “reconciliation exercise”.
Reconciliation is the expression used in accounting to describe the process of comparing different financial records to check these add up. The TWSS examination centred in the main on the transitional period at the outset of the scheme when a flat-rate of €410 a week was paid per employee.
“At present, Revenue is not undertaking any large-scale investigations into either scheme,” the tax body said.
“However, Revenue continues to examine certain entities as part of its ongoing compliance activity where appropriate.”
The TWSS ran from March 2020 until August that year, when the EWSS was introduced. The EWSS was in place until April 2022 for most eligible employers and until the following month for employers who faced public health restrictions in December 2021 and January 2022.
To benefit from the TWSS, workers were required be on an employer’s payroll on February 29th, 2020, and to remain on payroll during the scheme. Workers’ pay and tax details were reported to the Revenue service.
