The Revenue Commissioners said this evening at least 5,000 people have declared themselves in a voluntary disclosure scheme aimed at uncovering life assurance products bought with money not declared for taxation purposes.
The deadline for availing of the "amnesty" passed this evening with the figure for applicants at least doubling since Friday.
Revenue Commissioners spokesman
The Revenue Commissioners believe thousands of people have used life assurance schemes - particularly single premium products - to hide untaxed income over the past 25 years.
Some estimates have put the amount of tax, interest and penalties likely to be paid back to the State at €1 billion. It is that investments exceeding €20,000 will be targetted first when a full investigation gets under way.
A spokesman told ireland.comthis evening that a clearer idea of the number of people who came forward would be known later this week but that the amount of money involved could only be estimated after the deadline for full declaration on July 22 nd.
"All we have asked people to do is come forward and say 'I intend to make a full declaration'. They then have 60 days to work out their liability and only then can we work out how much is involved," the spokesman said.
Once the July deadline has passed the Commissioner's will then begin seeking court orders to examine insurance products of interest.
"We'll go through it company by company. It's the money used to buy the products we're interested in rather than the products themselves - and we'll start that almost immediately after the final declaration," the spokesman said.
Previous disclosure schemes have raised several billion euro with 11,000 people coming forward in the investigation into bogus non-resident accounts and 14,000 cases emerging from the inquiry into off-shore assets.