Madam, - I spent last weekend with a 92-year-old lady who had just received a letter questioning where she had got the money to make an investment in an insurance company bond many years ago. As it happens, this lady had at one stage been the only female director of any public company in Ireland; she was not intimidated by the request and had a good knowledge of the legitimate source of the funds. Unfortunately, many elderly people who receive similar letters will not be in the same position.
Is it not time that we drew a line in the sand in relation to long past tax transgressions? It should not be acceptable in our society that we harass the elderly for what happened many years ago because it happens to be possible to force them to divulge sources of assets, while at the same time we ignore the tax transgressions in the late 1970s and 1980s of much of corporate Ireland because we have no option.
Those of us who were active in business in those years know full well that the cash economy at that time - the economy that fiddled VAT and PAYE - was substantial. No sector was beyond reproach, the worst probably being the building industry and farming. Only a few years before that period I well remember a tax inspector in Cork expressing astonishment that my father kept PAYE records for his two farm employees. The phrase "red book" was virtually a part of the Hiberno-English dictionary and red-book money fuelled a creaking economy. Many companies had to make a choice between managing their affairs above board with an inevitable decline in their fortunes because they were no longer competitive or resorting to what we now condemn as unacceptable practices. Particularly hard hit were the many companies owned by Quaker families which had traditionally been so caring of their employees.
Possession or the ability to obtain possession should not be nine-tenths of the law. We need to move on from a situation where every time the Revenue needs the odd billion it goes for it where it is most easily got, regardless of the distress and trauma caused or the length of time that has elapsed since the tax should have been paid.
Leadership from the Taoiseach is needed on this issue which has the potential to cause great personal misery. The youth of the current Minister for Finance means it is unlikely that he will have as full an appreciation of just how much society, the economy and attitudes have changed over the past 25 years. - Yours, etc,
RICHARD HAYES,
Chief Executive,
IFG Group,
Booterstown,
Co Dublin.