Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 1 June 2017

Public Accounts Committee

2015 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriations Account
Chapter 13 - Revenue's Review of Medical Consultants' Tax Affairs
Chapter 14 - Research and Development Tax Credit
Chapter 16 - Deferral of Tobacco Stamp Liability

9:00 am

Mr. Niall Cody:

The cases that took the longest were the early one when we had started to identify the issue and to go into the legal advice and so on. As I said earlier, when we started, people did not use the opportunity to make a thorough disclosure. They felt that their cases stood up. Once the process had started and the first number of cases were published, the level of disclosure increased. It became clear that we were seriously challenging these cases, so people tended to settle more quickly. We showed that we were not giving up. It is probably a trend in all our projects that it takes longer to settle the earliest cases.