Small gift exemption

Does it come off your lifetime allowances?

The exemption is €3000 per year on gifts between a specific disponer and a specific beneficiary. As such, a single person can give gifts valued at €3000 or less to as many beneficiaries as they wish in a single year and none of those gifts would be subject to tax. Similarly, a beneficiary can receive gifts valued at €3000 or less from any number of disponers and would not have to pay tax on them. Only if specific person A gives specific person B more than €3000 in gifts in a single year would CAT (or aggregation against the lifetime CAT exemption thresholds) be applied.

A gift cannot have requirements - each an every one of those 100 friends could decide to keep it and give you nothing.

If given to them with a requirement to then give it to you, it will come from your Group A threshold as it will be seen as the obvious transfer from parent to child that it is.

Is there anywhere that documents the details of the small gift exemption?

Looking on both revenue.ie and citizensinformation.ie there isn't much detail regarding the exemption.

Revenue don’t need any more evidence.

They will raise an assessment and it will be up to you to prove- to revenue’s satisfaction, that this was innocent transaction, without your knowledge, and that you happened to receive 100 gifts if €3,000 in the same year, all originating from your father.

You will be laughed out of it.

Selling an asset to someone at an undervalue is a gift, to the extent of the undervalue. So if the Revenue become aware of the transaction, and if the value involved mean that there is a CAT liability, yeah, they'll charge the tax.

In practice the gift will be well within the 335k group A lifetime exemption, so unless the child has already received very substantial gifts/inheritances from their parents, the only consequence will be to eat away a tiny little bit at that exemption.