Tax is the new sex. Once, pinch-faced men with fiercely-cropped grey heads policed the prescribed moralism of the day by beating fornicating couples out of hedges with hawthorn sticks; nowadays, individuals of disquietingly familiar aspect and fanaticism pore over reports of tribunals and High Court inspectors in pursuit of transgressors of the new Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not evade thy taxes without hanging thy Armani jacket on the back of a cell door in Mountjoy, writes John Waters.
They are a fearsome lot, this new clergy, brooking neither dissent nor moral equivocation. The rules, they say, are simple and absolute: everyone has a moral duty to pay tax; personal conscience or circumstances are irrelevant.
Underlying the Ansbacher circus is an unspoken set of rules without which the discussion would, lacking a moral engine, become stalled by a constellation of caveats and qualifiers. Any attempt to question these rules is dismissed as "amoral", so it is clear that these rules are not merely technocratic regulations which may be contested on the basis of logic or subjective reason. They are moral rules.
So let us have a stab at naming them. The first rule, obviously, is that the payment of taxes is a moral obligation, deriving from membership of society and having to do with the responsibility to contribute to society on the basis of relative wealth.
The scale of this responsibility is to be determined by the State which, by virtue of having a democratically-elected government, has an absolute right to levy and demand payment of taxes and punish those who refuse to pay. There shall be no capacity in this arrangement for opting out on the basis of subjective assessments of either personal or public interest. Any such refusal shall be regarded as fraud.
Very well. It can be taken from this admittedly crude summary that the issues which arise from Ansbacher are not merely fairness, equality or, less still, personal pique. The anger being directed at tax-defaulters is not simply the righteous anger of those who have paid till they bled, but a moral anger, arising from a constant and immutable principle, transcending all other considerations, including, presumably, national boundaries.
We do not condemn tax-evasion merely because the Irish State may have been defrauded - any evasion of tax deemed by the relevant authorities to be due to any state with a democratically-elected government is morally wrong.
Very well. Then, a simple question: When is the Government going to appoint a High Court inspector to investigate the activities of trans-national corporations (TNCs) operating in Ireland? I am not suggesting that such corporations are engaged in defrauding the State. I have no doubt that all of them pay their fair share of taxes to the Exchequer. Indeed, there is ample evidence that many of them pay more than their fair of taxes in this country. That's all right then, is it not? - they have fulfilled their moral obligation.
In his fine book, Inside the Celtic Tiger, Denis O'Hearn drew attention to the phenomena of profit-shifting and transfer-pricing as practised by trans-national corporations operating in this jurisdiction.
Because Ireland has one of the lowest rates of profit taxation in the world, many such companies come here to avail of these benefits and - happily - provide employment in the Irish economy. Nothing wrong so far, since our tax rates are legitimate and approved, albeit reluctantly, by our international partners. However, studies of the sector have uncovered a tendency on the part of mainly US companies to employ creative accounting practices to shift their profits from high-taxation to low-taxation economies, and there is considerable evidence that some utilise the low Irish tax rates to avoid taxation at home.
The device employed is a paper transaction by which components are sold to subsidiaries in low-tax economies at artificially low prices, and prices of finished products are artificially inflated to ensure that a disproportionate element of overall profits qualifies for the lowest rates of tax. These practices are surreptitious and many TNCs are said to have two sets of books - one for the tax authorities, another to keep track on their own activities.
Profit levels for US TNCs in Ireland have been running at three times the level of other TNCs operating here, up to five times the level achieved by the same companies in other economies, and some 10 times the level of indigenous firms. There is, then, considerable evidence that Irish taxation conditions are being improperly used by US-owned firms to evade taxation in the United States. (Wouldn't it be hilarious if, in the future, a US court report were to find that Ireland during the 1990s became the industrial equivalent of the Cayman Islands?)
A number of academic commentators have for more that a decade been drawing attention to these disquieting practices, but to no avail. This is perplexing, given the appetite for fiscal probity we have shown in recent times. Surely our desire to expose tax-evasion wherever we may find it is not compromised by the possibility that US TNCs might simply withdraw from the Irish economy if we started to apply our clearly-established moral principles to their activities!
That we are among the net beneficiaries and that the consequences of these evasions are visited not on this society, but on the citizens of the United States, can surely have no bearing on the application of what are, after all, clear moral principles. Boom, boom!