Taoiseach urges clarity in tax controversy

TAOISEACH ENDA Kenny has called for clarity to be brought to the ongoing controversy surrounding Revenue’s recent letter to pensioners.

Concerned older people and their families are continuing to contact special helplines opened last Friday.

A Revenue spokesman was unable to say how many calls were received yesterday, but he confirmed that about 20,000 were logged on Friday and Saturday together. Such has been the confusion that calls have also been received from people who did not receive one of the 150,000 letters.

Mr Kenny said the decision to dispatch the letters last week after receiving new information about pension payments from the Department of Social Protection had caused “anxiety and concern” among pensioners. “I accept that there’s been confusion and therefore anxiety and concern for numbers of people who are pensioners as a result of the letters that were sent out by the Revenue Commissioners,” Mr Kenny said.

“The Revenue Commissioners themselves are in before the Oireachtas committees this week and obviously what’s important now is that there be clarity brought to this matter as quickly as possible so that everybody knows where they stand.”

Mr Kenny was speaking in his Mayo constituency yesterday.

Revenue officials and Department of Social Protection personnel will appear before the Oireachtas finance, public expenditure and reform committee tomorrow afternoon. On the agenda are matters relating to pensions and potential tax liabilities.

Fine Gael chairman Charlie Flanagan described the situation as a “debacle” in one of a number of tweets he posted about the controversy yesterday. “Pensioner fear, anxiety and anger continues over tax probe. My constituency very busy with Laois-Offaly queries from early morning,” Mr Flanagan said.

Fianna Fáil accused the Government of attempting to distance itself from the matter, with environment spokesman Niall Collins also calling on the Revenue Commissioners to provide a temporary community outreach service to address pensioners’ concerns.

“This situation has been very badly handled by all involved. The Government have attempted to distance themselves from the controversy despite the fact that they knew that this mail-out was taking place more than a month in advance, at the very least. Still they chose not to inform pensioners about what was to happen,” Mr Collins said.

“I am calling on Revenue to go out into the community and provide a temporary outreach service to give these people the opportunity to get personal advice on paying back any extra tax owed due to a miscalculation of their liabilities.”

Revenue has continued to defend its action with Declan Rigney, principal officer in PAYE, planning and support services arguing that a general notification or series of advertisements might have created more confusion.

“Our approach was to send out specific targeted letters to people to try and explain as best we could their particular circumstances. The alternative would have been to go with a general notification and I suppose we had concerns that if we were to do that it could end up confusing and upsetting a lot more people,” Mr Rigney said. Mr Kenny said he had heard this statement, but did not express a view on it.

Some 150,000 pensioners have received letters from the Revenue. An estimated 115,000 of these have tax liabilities, the majority of whom are on smaller occupational pensions. Single people over 65 with an annual total income of less than €18,000, or married people on less than €36,000, are exempt from income tax. Also not liable for income tax are people in receipt of a long-term Department of Social Protection pension with no other sources of income.

Investigations yield €2.67bn €50m of cigarettes/tobacco seized

Special investigations by the Revenue Commissioners have yielded some €2.67 billion, it was confirmed yesterday as the Revenue issued its preliminary business results for 2011.

The yield has been generated over a period of years but the new data showed almost €50 million worth of cigarettes and tobacco were seized by Customs last year.The total yield from offshore assets since special investigations began was almost €1 billion, with almost €10.6 million collected last year.

Revenue secured a total of 30 convictions for "serious evasion" in 2011. A further 115 investigations are ongoing, while 76 cases are either before the courts or have been considered by the Director of Public Prosecutions but are not yet in the courts process.

In addition, there were 2,075 prosecutions for non-filing of P35, VAT, income tax and corporation tax returns. A total of 44,496 collection enforcements were carried out with a total yield of €236.8 million.

A total of 557,565 audits and checks were carried out by the Revenue Commissioners in 2011, yielding a total of €482.8 million.

Tax compliance rates stood at 98 per cent for those who had an annual tax liability of over €500,000 while compliance among those with annual tax liabilities of between €75,000 and €500,000 was 95 per cent. MARY MINIHAN