Tens of thousands of tax defaulters have made settlements with the Revenue in the years since the body's powers were strengthened in 1999, it has emerged.
New figures released to the Labour Party indicate that 87,255 defaulters made settlements of some €1.6 billion from 1999 until June of this year.
The party's finance spokeswoman, Ms Joan Burton, said last night that such figures implied a "truly astonishing" scale of evasion. The threat of heavy penalties and the "potential shame" of settlements being published by the Government were not deterring evaders, she said.
More than one in every 20 taxpayers had "at some stage, since 1999, been identified as tax defaulters and forced to make settlements with the Revenue", she said.
While Revenue routinely publishes the total sum of money collected from defaulters, only settlements of more than €12,700 are published in Iris Oifigiúl.
There were 2,777 published cases from 1999 until the end of last June, according to information released by the Minister for Finance, Mr Cowen.
In a reply to a parliamentary question from Labour, he said there had been 15,000 to 17,000 cases every year in the same period in which the settlements did not exceed the €12,700 threshold.
"Even allowing for the considerable level of settlements arising from inquiries into earlier scandals ..., each published list contains many tax defaulters who clearly believe that tax evasion is still worth the financial risk," Ms Burton said. She said the quarterly list of offenders published in Iris Oifigiúl "represent less than 20 per cent of the settlements made - €311 million out of €1.607 billion".
Ms Burton pointed out that there had been 18 prosecutions against defaulters in the same period and said that only three evaders who were convicted had to serve time.Until Revenue began to employ the powers available to them to initiate prosecutions, "the current level of evasion will continue", Ms Bruton argued.
Most of the settlements included in Mr Cowen's figures are not included in the Revenue's trawl of offshore accounts this year.
Of 6,868 settlements totalling €224.63 million in the first half of this year, only 501 cases, totalling €84.93 million, were published. There were 15,658 settlements worth €423.04 million last year, with 1,257 of them, totalling €133.92 million, published. Some 15,951 settlements worth a total of €265.46 million were recorded in 2002, while 272 cases worth €35.41 million were published.
In 2001, there were 16,022 settlements valued at €202 million. Some 295 cases valued at €25.44 million were published.
The yield from 16,000 settlements in 2000 was €355.9 million, of which 258 cases totalling €19.05 million were published. There were 16,938 settlements totalling €136.87 in 1999. Of these cases, 194 were published, totalling €12.32 million.
