Ms Josephine Feehily:

The amnesty was designed to create a brick-solid Chinese wall between everybody and the office of the chief special collector, which was specially established. The chief special collector and his staff handled all of the amnesty declarations. On foot of those declarations - they were not allowed to examine them and they had no access to the tax files of the declarants - they issued the declarants with certificates. In law, those certificates were sufficient evidence to the rest of Revenue to the effect that, at any time in the future, we could not look behind them. A special unit was established. Those present from the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General will recall that Revenue had to suspend its internal audit function because of the difficulty of finding officials who had never seen tax files. An assurance had to be given that such officials would never see such files in the future and this meant that their careers had to be managed. I recall this because I worked in human resources, HR, at the time. We were obliged to suspend the internal audit function in order to find people who we could state were in compliance with the law because they had never been involved - as tax inspectors within the Collector General's office or anywhere else - in cases in the past. There was a logistical dimension involved which I do remember. An impervious wall - behind which the amnesty declarations are to this day - was put in place.

To this day we have a chief special collector and if a taxpayer produces an amnesty certificate to an inspector in the context of any investigation, the inspector, once he or she has it, can verify by asking the chief special collector whether the certificate is authentic and that is all that can be done.