There was a strange omission from the lists of the indicted in media treatments of last week's report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on the national epidemic of bogus non-resident accounts. While the finger of blame was consistently pointed at the banks, at the Revenue Commissioners, at the Central Bank, at the proverbial "successive governments", at political and State institutions, there was little mention of the people who held the bogus accounts and presumably profited more than any of the aforementioned.
The closest we got to an indictment of the account holders was when the editorial writer in Wednesday's Irish Independent briefly acknowledged that "ordinary citizens who held these accounts behaved disgracefully", before moving on to the less "ordinary" culprits.
There is a good reason why newspapers or radio and television programmes might wish to gloss over this aspect: many of their readers/ listeners/ viewers are likely to be among the guilty parties. In all, we appear to be talking about a minimum of a quarter of a million bogus accounts, which, assuming they were mostly held by different individuals, amounts to a significant proportion of the adult population. The "ordinary citizens" who "behaved disgracefully", therefore, were as likely as not to be readers of the Irish Independent. Indeed, considering the likely socio-economic profile of account holders, it is probable that an even higher proportion are readers of this newspaper - perhaps one in four of you, at a conservative estimate.
It is theoretically possible that a bogus account was held by one member of every second family in the State - so this scandal is quite different to others we have been contemplating of late. It involves pointing the finger inwards to ourselves rather than outwards at others.
But it may draw attention to the futility of finger-pointing in the first place. In Economic Philosophy Joan Robinson explores the basis of what we regard as socio-economic morality, arguing that the rules of the economy are not absolute moral values, but mechanisms of cohesion that make social life possible. The point about dishonesty, she says, is not that it is morally repugnant, but that it is a "nuisance": it makes social life difficult. Teaching honesty is therefore a technical rather than a moral requirement. By this logic, compliance with tax law is a social contract rather than a moral obligation: only if it can be shown that evasion of taxes causes pain or loss to others, and that this was a foreseeable consequence of the evasion, does it become a moral question.
The reason we have saturated this territory with concepts of morality is that socio-economic cohesion is not of itself a sufficient incentive to prevent individuals from opting out of the collective contract. Without the pseudo-moral dimension, it might be persuasive for the individual to decide that social cohesion could function fine and dandy if everyone else observed the necessary requirements of correct social behaviour, leaving the individual the opportunity of opting out of the social contract while availing fully of its benefits.
The ideal situation for the individual in relation to matters fiscal is if everyone else observes the social obligation to pay tax, leaving him free to avoid it without significant damage to the social fabric. But, clearly, if everyone took this view, social life would disintegrate. There is therefore a conflict between collective and individual interest, which is why we have introduced concepts of morality to what are essentially technical issues. If anyone doubts the logic of this, consider the fact that the reason advanced by the authorities for the failure to put a stop to bogus non-resident accounts was that to do so would have undermined the economy: any attempt to deal with the issue might have resulted in a flight of capital. The evasion of DIRT, therefore, was regarded as the lesser of evils: the "moral" dimension was placed second to the need for economic cohesion.
THERE is something of a mystery, then, as to precisely what codes we now imagine have been breached by the DIRT scandal. Most of us cannot truly feel offended by people dodging DIRT, especially when these "offenders" might be our brothers, sisters, friends or readers. I believe we also have a strong collective sense that DIRT is perhaps the most repugnant tax ever devised by the Irish exchequer, drawing as it does on the measly returns on funds on which income tax has already - theoretically at least - been levied.
You have to delve deep into the undergrowth before you can get your arms around any of the primary moral principles which are purportedly at stake here. Like virtually all aspects of our economic life, taxation of non-resident accounts is a matter of rules and regulations rather than absolute moral principles.
Maybe the only moral issue here is why accounts held by non-residents were deemed to be free from DIRT in the first place. And maybe the reason we become outraged on hearing that someone has evaded tax is not because of some offence to our moral sensibility, but because this person has broken the rule which we have felt constrained to observe. Who, then, takes issue with what has occurred? Who is offended by it, and why? The authorities, clearly, do not feel aggrieved, or at least did not do so until the scam was exposed. The banks have been quite happy to facilitate their customers, thereby allegedly preventing the collapse of the Irish economy. The customers, those in the know at least, can have few complaints, especially since it is the banks who must now pay the back tax.
Certainly, there is much pious talk about "compliant taxpayers", but these, in the main, seem to be people like myself who did not know about the benefits of having a bogus non-resident account. And nobody, I notice, is proposing to compensate us in the only manner in which the "moral" equilibrium of this situation might be restored: the refunding of all taxation levied under the DIRT scheme.
Mostly what is offended, then, is the bogus morality our societies have created around the issue of rendering unto Caesar. The reason we seek to make much of this issue, in particular why we seek to fix the blame on the institutions and authorities involved, is to exercise our collective grievance at having to pay tax at all.
This scandal, we reasonably believe, shows the duplicity and hypocrisy of the authorities, and the bogus nature of the supposed moral imperative to pay tax. So the point of public outrage is not to create conditions wherein there will be less tax evasion, but to create a rationalisation for still more: for if the authorities have sanctioned this behaviour in the past, how can they seriously adopt a righteous approach to evasion in the future?