The amount of money collected through the various recent Revenue investigations and special schemes has now topped €1.5 billion. It is an extraordinary sum, roughly equivalent, for example, to the amount collected in one year from all self-employed taxpayers. And there is no doubt that there is more to come as the Revenue's investigation into offshore accounts continues and the tax authorities start to look at some other avenues of inquiry, for example by examining property purchases by Irish residents in France and Spain and the use of offshore credit cards.
The huge yield from investigations into areas such as bogus non-resident accounts, issues raised in various tribunals and money held offshore, paints a picture of a tax system which was hugely deficient for a number of years. Only in hindsight has the extent of the tax evasion through the 1980s and into the 1990s become clear. For much of this period the PAYE sector was paying what it owed, but thousands of others were not.
The banks and financial institutions have been criticised - correctly - for encouraging evasion through vehicles such as bogus non-resident accounts. In hindsight, it is clear that successive governments, the Revenue and the Central Bank also failed to act. The final part of the picture was the decision by tens of thousands of individuals to avail of the opportunity to evade tax. Some, as we now know, were senior figures in political and business life, but it is clear that tax evasion was endemic.
Have things changed? The Revenue Commissioners' annual report, published yesterday, gives some cause for optimism. Huge sums have been collected through the various investigations. Many of those who evaded tax are now paying up, together with interest and penalties. Also, it is clear that the Revenue intends to use the powers it has in a rigorous fashion, for example by looking at the records held in Irish financial institutions. It is still possible to hide money from the tax authorities, but it is getting a lot more difficult - and also riskier - to do so. The Revenue has also reorganised itself and is promising a much more active approach to cases where there is evidence of evasion. For many years much of the resources of the Revenue were directed to endless correspondence of tax assessments, while major evasion largely went untackled. Now the tax authorities are promising to focus on the big picture.
There is still some way to go. Prosecution of tax evaders remains rare, cases take a long time to come to court and we have still to see anyone go to jail for undertaking or facilitating evasion. One of the payments in the latest tax settlement scheme - which allows those who avail of it to avoid prosecution - involved a figure of €7 million, and a number of others involved several million euro. If the tax system is to have any credibility in the future, then jail must be a prospect for those people who cynically evade large tax payments. For the moment, however, at least many of the evaders are paying up.