Officials write off €143m bill for overdue taxes

Revenue: The Revenue wrote off €143.3 million in outstanding tax bills last year, according to the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) for 2005.

Company failures accounted for the bulk of the tax write-off with 1,263 companies owing €69.9 million to the tax authorities going into liquidation, receivership or bankruptcy.

A further 2,032 companies that ceased trading had no assets to meet outstanding tax liabilities of €34.9 million.

Among the 65,762 cases where tax was written off in 2005, almost 61,000 were abandoned as being "uneconomic to pursue".

The total amount written off in 2005 was down 20 per cent on the €172.5 million of debts that the Revenue decided not to pursue any further in 2004.

However, there was a significant increase in the number of cases written off. In 2004, just 26,141 cases were left aside.

Cases which were the subject of investigation, potential Ansbacher cases and issues that fell under the Criminal Assets Bureau were all excluded from the prospect of being written off.

The C&AG said the largest single write-off was €8.2 million in corporation tax owed by a company in receivership. Five other cases involved sums greater than €1 million.

There was a significant decline in the amount of VAT written off last year to €48.4 million from €72.4 million a year previously. Elsewhere, the breakdown by category of outstanding tax which will not now be pursued was: PRSI (€24.7 million); PAYE (€23.9 million); income tax (€23.8 million); corporation tax (€15.4 million); and capital gains tax (€2.3 million).

A total of €1.1 billion in taxes was outstanding at the end of March last. This amounts to roughly 2 per cent of tax that fell due last year and is an improvement on the €1.2 billion that was outstanding 12 months earlier.

Just €241 million of the money related to taxes that arose in 2005 with €336 million dating back more than five years.

The C&AG expressed concern that the system for handling Revenue appeals was not as efficient as it could be. At times, appeals were taking more than two years to reach the Appeals Commissioners.

At the end of June last, special Revenue investigations had yielded a total of €2.22 billion, according to the C&AG's report. The investigation into offshore assets has, to date, yielded payments of €826 million with the report stating that the figure may eventually hit €1 billion.

The most recent investigation - into single premium life assurance products - has already yielded €398 million, a figure that may rise to more than €500 million, according to Revenue.

It expects the investigations into bogus non-resident accounts and the National Irish Bank offshore investments to conclude within the next couple of years with about €24 million in payments expected between the two.