Five chapters relating to the Revenue Commissioners from the 2012 C&AG Annual Reports and the 2012 Revenue Commissioners Vote Accounts will be on the agenda of the Committee of Public Accounts when it meets with Josephine Feehily, Chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, tomorrow, Thursday, 20th February 2014 .
Chairman of the Committee John McGuinness said: “Chapters 23 to 27 of the C&AG Annual Report relating to the Revenue Commissioners will be focus of the Committee of Public Accounts tomorrow, with issues such as Revenue collection, management or Revenue debt, taxpayer compliance, corporation tax losses and tax audit settlements being considered.
In 2013, €37.8 billion was collected in tax. This is an increase on recent years and income tax and PSRI now account for a much greater proportion of direct taxes collected. A key issue for the Committee is the forecasting of tax revenue and its accuracy. Management of Revenue Debt will also be of interest. At the end of March 2013, just over €2 billion of debt was owed to Revenue. Over 40% of this was regarded as being non-collectible, mainly due to being under appeal. The Committee may wish to question Revenue on its debt collection targets, which for 2012 were not met and how such target setting can be improved upon.
As well as taxpayer compliance, how it can be assessed and non-compliance detected, the Committee will also consider the area of corporation tax losses. Corporation tax losses available for offset are highly concentrated in a small number of companies and so the Committee may wish to discuss how Revenue plans on keeping these cases under regular review. In 2012, Revenue reported that just over 9,000 audits carried out resulted in yields of €359 million. Audit work conducted by the C&AG suggest that this reported audit yield is materially overstated as 9 out of 45 cases examined were incorrectly classified as an audit intervention. The Committee may wish to enquire as to whether Revenue has revised this yield as a result.”
This meeting will start in Committee Room 1 at 10am on Thursday, 20th February 2014.
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