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Are the public sector workers/unions in cloud cuckoo land?
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Easy. There's about 350 tax defaulters on each spreadsheet, so about 1400 in a year. They're not all self-employed, but we'll ignore that for now.
According to the CSO, there's about 324,500 self-employed people in the country.
So the tax defaulters list would represent 0.43% of the self-employed in any given year - assuming that everyone on the list is self-employed, which they're not, and assuming they are all fiddling their taxes. Now it so happens that someone I know is on one of this year's lists, and so I know the latter is not true either. Far from fiddling his taxes, he is on the defaulters list because he is unable to pay his taxes, and too depressed to contact the Revenue about it.
So we are left with a figure a good deal smaller than 0.43% of the self-employed who are found to be fiddling their taxes in any given year. Now, one can question the Revenue's detection rates, but sooner or later nearly everyone gets audited, and if one is found to be fiddling taxes for the audit year, the audit spreads out. If you're not self-employed, you've probably never been through a Revenue audit, but try to imagine the Garda spending a couple of days at your house, asking for receipts for everything you own. The mere probability of audit does a lot to promote honesty.
Nor does the Revenue apparently feel that their detection rates are less than 1%, which is what would be required to get from the figures for detected tax default to a majority of the self-employed. For even 10% of the self-employed to be tax fiddlers and produce the figures we see, Revenue detection rates would need to be 2.5%, which would still be a national scandal.
So the view that any significant proportion of the self-employed are engaged in tax fiddling is not supported at all by the available figures, including the figures that posters here have "referred to" as supposedly backing their case. Do the arithmetic, people, before chucking these "everybody knows" generalisations about.
cordially,
Scofflaw
I've taken the time this am to have a look at the figures. Firstly, in relation to your point "Do the arithmetic, people, before chucking these "everybody knows" generalisations about" I agree and apologise because when I said to Jimmmy that the figures were posted I hadn't taken the time to look at them
. I should have looked at them properly at the time because I can now see that they only tell a fraction of the story.
So to the figures themselves. As I said I've had a look at them and I've observed the following:
1. The figures don't seem to include cases referred to the sheriff for collection. In my time in Revenue many more cases were referred to the sheriff for collection than were referred to the solicitors to pursue a judgement. You'll have to take my honest word for that, no stats I'm afraid but in my time (five years) I only ever referred a handful of cases to the solicitors while I sent hundreds to the sheriff. The main reasons they were referred to the Sheriff rather than the solictors were that the solicitors obtained a judgement against the defaulter but rarely collected money. The Sheriff always collected money or goods, maybe not all that was owed but he brought a sizeable proportion of what he was asked to collect. He was always seen as the more favourable option of the two.
2. The figures don't seem to refer to the number of instalment arrangements that Revenue staff did with people during the specified periods. It was, and I imagine still is, always preferable for both the Revenue staff and the taxpayer to sit down together and thrash out a deal rather than refer a case to the sheriff or solicitor. Most defaulters said they didn't have all the money they owed when you spoke with them so depending on how much they owed and their current circumstances you could give them anywhere from six months to five years to pay their arrears. While doing this you would also agree a system to assist them to maintain payment of current taxes such as direct debit.
3. IIRC there were situations where Revenue would agree not to publish your details when you made a settlement. It depended on the amount you owed and/or your willingness to co-operate. In my experience a majority of defaulters who settled their taxes quickly after being detected avoided having their names published.
So I believe the link posted by dresden8 contains only a fraction of the names of tax defaulters during the specified periods. And I do apologise for referring to it as a catch-all answer. If Revenue have stats on referrals to the sheriff and instalment arrangements they might make interesting reading in the context of this thread.
As regards your friend I certainly accept your word that he is unable to pay rather than deliberately avoiding paying his share. I wish my word might be accepted by others (not you btw) in the same spirit
. Whatever his problems does he not think he should just sit down with them and talk it out? As someone who worked at the other end, one of the most frustrating aspects of the job was people avoiding you rather than talking it out and trying to reach some compromise. If his name is on that list might be too late . 0 -
You still have not answered the question : How many people did you come across who were master dodgers, and what proportion is that out of the hundreds of thousands of self-employed / small business people ?
You answer the question as you are the expert in that area : "How many people did you come across who were master dodgers, and what proportion is that out of the hundreds of thousands of self-employed / small business people "
See my answer above to Scofflaw. That's about as comprehensive an answer as I'm going to give the day after being to a wedding with my head thumping.
I do want to say sorry however. I'm sorry I every responded to you in the first place as your subsequent posts across this board have shown to me that you are a crank who probably escaped from Liveline or the Indo letters page. This morning I've read your latest posts on the 5k tax for public servants thread and I've realised that you will just keep going and going and going like the Ever Ready bunny no matter how valid a point someone else makes. No matter how valid their overall point is you'll find a little line somewhere to quibble with and off you'll go again
So I could respond to your question above and say that over a five year period I personally dealt with hundreds of defaulters and hundreds of my colleagues dealt with a similar number but what's the point? Without hard stats my word means nothing to you.
Did you know that Ireland is a very wet country? Do I need stats to prove that I've been pissed on more times than I've had hot dinners or do you think it's possible that Ireland is actually a wet country and you might believe me when I say it? Yesterday at this wedding I was at, the majority of people went up for communion. Honestly they did. I didn't count them but will you take my word for it? At the same wedding about half the lads took off to watch the match up in the bar rather than stay at the reception. How do I know? Well I was there and saw with my own eyes. Sorry no stats just the experience of being there.Yes. Some people will sometimes do nixers etc, no matter what walk of life they are from.
So only people in the PAYE section would have dealt with "teachers, lecturers etc" ? How would people in the PAYE section have detected teachers doing grinds, Lecturers doing summer touristy cash work, Gardai letting a house, a paye disc jockey from a radio station opening a "friends" niteclub, a FAs employee doing a nixer etc ? You said you came across tax dodgers but you never heard of them ? C'mon, you say you "used to be "the taxman" in a past life and the stories you could tell"...
Yet again your anti PS bias and bile is showing. You'd have to ask people in a PAYE section how they would have detected the people you list.
Yes I did say I used to be "the taxman" in a past life. You'll note the quotation marks I used whern I used the term originally and IIRC I put a smilie of some sort there as well when I originally said it. That was to denote some degree of humour. But having read your subsequent posts in this and other threads I now understand that humour is lost on you.go on, go on, go on.
Are you morphing into Mrs. Doyle?
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White dargo wrote: »I've taken the time this am to have a look at the figures. Firstly, in relation to your point "Do the arithmetic, people, before chucking these "everybody knows" generalisations about" I agree and apologise because when I said to Jimmmy that the figures were posted I hadn't taken the time to look at them. I should have looked at them properly at the time because I can now see that they only tell a fraction of the story.
So to the figures themselves. As I said I've had a look at them and I've observed the following:
1. The figures don't seem to include cases referred to the sheriff for collection. In my time in Revenue many more cases were referred to the sheriff for collection than were referred to the solicitors to pursue a judgement. You'll have to take my honest word for that, no stats I'm afraid but in my time (five years) I only ever referred a handful of cases to the solicitors while I sent hundreds to the sheriff. The main reasons they were referred to the Sheriff rather than the solictors were that the solicitors obtained a judgement against the defaulter but rarely collected money. The Sheriff always collected money or goods, maybe not all that was owed but he brought a sizeable proportion of what he was asked to collect. He was always seen as the more favourable option of the two.
2. The figures don't seem to refer to the number of instalment arrangements that Revenue staff did with people during the specified periods. It was, and I imagine still is, always preferable for both the Revenue staff and the taxpayer to sit down together and thrash out a deal rather than refer a case to the sheriff or solicitor. Most defaulters said they didn't have all the money they owed when you spoke with them so depending on how much they owed and their current circumstances you could give them anywhere from six months to five years to pay their arrears. While doing this you would also agree a system to assist them to maintain payment of current taxes such as direct debit.
3. IIRC there were situations where Revenue would agree not to publish your details when you made a settlement. It depended on the amount you owed and/or your willingness to co-operate. In my experience a majority of defaulters who settled their taxes quickly after being detected avoided having their names published.
So I believe the link posted by dresden8 contains only a fraction of the names of tax defaulters during the specified periods. And I do apologise for referring to it as a catch-all answer. If Revenue have stats on referrals to the sheriff and instalment arrangements they might make interesting reading in the context of this thread.
I don't have any problems with any of that. Indeed, while I'd happily take your word for it, I don't need to, since I have come to a repayment arrangement with the Revenue on a couple of occasions myself, and am well aware that matters have to slide quite a long way before they reach the tax defaulters list.
However, that's tax default, which is entirely different from tax fiddling. I would love to be able to pay the Revenue what I owe them, when I owe it, but the rest of the world regularly intervenes. Small businesses and sole traders have good periods and bad periods - and that's without considering how long it takes to (a) finish a job and (b) get paid.
If I have a good year, it means that I am too busy to do as much in the way of sales and the groundwork for sales as I should - and that means that good years are frequently followed by not so good ones. The difference can be as much as €30,000. When it comes to pay the taxes on a good year, I am usually up the other end of the subsequent bad year, and quite simply may not have the money to pay my tax at that time. I may have a major contract that will enable me to pay my bills, but the work may take 3 months to complete, and another month to get paid.
That may be hard for people on a steady paycheck to really come to grips with. It can literally mean surviving on credit for as long as 2-4 months while you chase the remaining debtors and slog through yet another contract whose payout recedes into the future as clients quibble over the last couple of items on the snag list, or while you chase the payment through a couple of months of evasions, excuses, and downright lies.
During that time I'm simply not going to be able to both pay the Revenue and put food on the table - or pay school fees, rent, electricity, gas, etc etc. The Revenue have always been very good about it, and they're not being treated any differently from anybody else - I can't pay until I can pay. I'll happily pay what I can in the interim, though.
So, while I have no problem accepting that the ratio between the tax defaulters list and the number of cases of sheriff referrals and payment arrangements is large, I don't think it has any real relation to the view that the self-employed are tax cheats, because those statistics include a very large component of honest inability to pay. We would need to see statistics on how many of the Revenues proceedings against people are the result of detected tax fraud - I think we'll find it's a very small number.White dargo wrote: »As regards your friend I certainly accept your word that he is unable to pay rather than deliberately avoiding paying his share. I wish my word might be accepted by others (not you btw) in the same spirit. Whatever his problems does he not think he should just sit down with them and talk it out? As someone who worked at the other end, one of the most frustrating aspects of the job was people avoiding you rather than talking it out and trying to reach some compromise. If his name is on that list might be too late .
Had I known he was letting things slide, I'd have chased him. Banks, the Revenue, same thing - you need to keep communicating, especially if you can't pay. Same goes for anyone here who finds themselves in trouble with their mortgage, God forbid - talk to the bank as soon as possible. They are not so concerned about getting the money now as in knowing that they will get it eventually, and they are staffed by people, not heartless machines.
cordially,
Scofflaw0 -
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