Ceifin Conference: The chairman of the Revenue Commissioners has described as "deplorable" the "legacy of widespread institutional tax evasion which came to light in recent years".
Speaking in a personal capacity at the Céifin conference in Ennis, Co Clare, yesterday, Frank Daly said: "I'll leave it to you and others to consider the lost opportunities and think about 'what might have been' if Ireland inc had access to the hundreds of millions in revenues that were evaded over a couple of depressed decades."
He continued: "To those who say it's unfair to pursue taxpayers who engaged in tax evasion 20 years ago I would respond - okay, I understand where you're coming from, but I need to ask you these questions: 'what about fairness for the honest citizen? What about fairness for those who struggled every week to pay their taxes? What about fairness for those who struggled to keep businesses going in the face of unequal competition subsidised by tax evasion? What about fairness for those who may have been deprived of better services because tax revenues were not what they ought to have been during those years'?"
Noting that the Revenue Commissioners had collected over €2.2 billion "from these legacy investigations and there is more to come", he emphasised the investigations were not about money alone. They had proved to be "key drivers in promoting a growing public intolerance of tax evasion and an increasing public awareness of tax obligations".
Tax evasion was "a black and white affair - it is always inexcusable", he said, but that "the mists really descend when tax avoidance is mentioned and the vision quickly turns grey and becomes obscured". Avoidance was "somewhere on the spectrum between evasion [always wrong] and legitimate tax planning [always right]", he said. He referred to some commentators who argued that if tax avoidance "is legal, then it's ethical, and that morality or values don't come into it. To put this argument of course of itself betrays a set of values".
His belief was that "most people would find it hard to accept the proposition that just because something can be shown [or artificially structured] to fit within the strict letter of the law that it then doesn't really matter if it clearly offends against the spirit and purpose of the law, or against the intention of the legislature". Evasion and avoidance "offended the community because of the real sense of unfairness they generate in those who practise neither. They offend also because they subvert the intentions of democratically elected government", he said.
In her address, Alice Leahy, director of Trust, the homeless agency, warned that "a widening gap between top managers and frontline carers in the health, social and homeless services" was "making conditions for the most vulnerable . . . much more difficult".
She spoke of a 90-year-old homeless man who had been allocated a nursing home place but who ended up spending six weeks in an acute hospital bed instead, because of bureaucratic bungling by the HSE. She also spoke of another homeless man who had his weekly €165 withdrawn because he refused to move into a hostel. Such "insensitive bureaucracy" belonged to the category of "human rights abuses", she felt.
Religious and social affairs commentator David Quinn said: "We have gone from being a nation of bargain-hunters to a nation of status-symbol hunters."
Broadcaster and author John Quinn criticised an education system "which decrees that only that which can be measured, assessed, tested, is of value".
