Tom Morrissey (Progressive Democrats)

This motion is ill-timed because it comes at a time when the Revenue Commissioners have successfully completed the roll-out of a dynamic new customer-focused risk-based regional operating structure. After a period of fundamental redesign, restructuring and upskilling of a complexity never before attempted in the Irish public service, the Revenue Commissioners and their staff have enthusiastically and with great flexibility responded to the ever-changing needs of a modern economy. This process of change continues and deepens apace under the umbrella of Sustaining Progress, and benchmarking.

The Revenue Commissioners have willingly embraced changes in work practices, fully integrating Customs and Excise with the mainstream taxes service, and launching new specialist operating divisions dealing nationally with the largest and most complex cases, as well as a new investigation and prosecutions division.

This motion is also ill-timed because it comes after a period of intensive capability building, where Revenue Commissioners chairman Frank Daly and Commissioners Fehilly and O'Grady have undertaken Trojan work to energise staff at all levels and rebuild morale after the trials of the Committee of Public Accounts hearings of 1999.

The Progressive Democrats is committed to ensuring the Revenue Commissioners are given all necessary resources, financial and human, to discharge their onerous duties. My party in Government will guarantee that the programme of modernisation already successfully started, and now copperfastened by the benchmarking flexibilities, is fully implemented. This motion asks us to respond to Revenue's initiative and change by launching an unveiled disingenuous attack on their professionalism, ability and commitment.

This motion is more than merely mis-timed. It is seriously ill-informed and ill-judged because it displays a breathtaking ignorance of critical elementary legal principles. All taxpayers are obliged to pay the proper amount of tax due on their income or capital whether corporate or personal. Where a taxpayer fails to do so, Revenue vigorously pursues 100% of the tax underpaid, plus interest due from the date it should have been paid, and a tax year penalty payment. This penalty is the punishment for failure to take due care, for error, omission, gross carelessness or negligence. These civil penalties are robustly but fairly and successfully enforced by Revenue.

This motion ignores this highly successful aspect of Revenue's audits programme, looking instead at a very different issue called evasion. The motion misunderstands the legal reality faced by Revenue. Tax evasion is a crime. The prosecutions that the Opposition representatives call for are criminal in nature, and if they are to succeed, they must meet the heavy burden of proof required in such cases. Most importantly, the motion fails to realise that the Revenue Commissioners do not have the right or authority to prosecute. That responsibility lies with another agency, the Director of Public Prosecutions. It is the DPP who directs whether a case should be prosecuted. The DPP will rightly only permit proceedings to be initiated if satisfied on the available admissible evidence that there is a case to answer and where the evidence is sufficiently robust to prove beyond doubt that an offence was committed.

It may have slipped the minds of my colleagues on the opposite side of the House but under our sound legal system, the accused, even those accused of tax evasion, are innocent until proven guilty. That guilt must be established beyond reasonable doubt. To successfully prosecute a case the Revenue must establish that a tax is not only underpaid but that the evader set out wilfully and knowingly on a pre-determined course of action, with deliberate intent to evade lawful tax. The mere fact that the tax due was not paid is not sufficient. That could be as a result of neglect or gross carelessness as opposed to the evil intent of the wilful evader.

The burden of proof rests rightly with the prosecution, the Revenue Commissioners. This is the fundamental issue facing Revenue. It must know a taxpayer is evading and how he or she is doing that but it must also establish that it is a wilful act of deliberate criminal intent beyond reasonable doubt. No matter where responsibility for tax prosecutions rests, this remains a mountain to be climbed. Indeed, one might consider the larger strategic question as to whether it would be in the national interest for Revenue or any other State agency to initiate prosecutions for criminal wrong-doing where it had little prospect of securing a conviction due to a lack of credible evidence as to criminal intent. What message would a series of acquittals send to those who might consider wrong-doing?

I urge the House to reject this unworkable, illogical proposal which would add a further layer of bureaucracy between the investigating officer and the prosecution service. Does anyone seriously believe this proposal will improve efficiency or the chances of successful prosecutions by divorcing investigation from prosecution?