Audit of ‘high net worth individuals’ yields €12m in tax and interest

AN audit of 12 ‘high net worth individuals’ by the Revenue Commissioners has yielded around €12 million in tax and interest, it emerged yesterday.

Revenue’s Large Cases Division, which monitors the tax affairs of the some of the country’s richest people and corporations, conducted audits of 20 multi-millionaires in the first few months of the year.

Revenue chairman Frank Daly would not say how much the audits generated individually, but said they were those involved worked in the construction sector — an area where the taxman plans to focus much if its attention this year.

The large cases division was set up to service those with assets of more than €50m and an annual salary of €1.3m. It also monitors wealthy non-residents based in Ireland.

“The division services 300 high net worth individuals, these are people who are responsible for a lot of the tax paid and it is appropriate to ensure we know what is going on and we have a handle on their affairs,” Mr Daly said.

“We did some 823 audits and assurance checks last year and the yield from that came to over €97m.

“Also during the year we did audits on nine non-residents here for tax purposes, just to assure ourselves that they were staying within the parameters of the law and we were able to conclude that they were.”

Revenue said it is staying in regulator contact with high net worth people to ensure that they were aware of their obligations. Their have been fears in the past that some millionaires were abusing residency status to reduce their tax bill.

Mr Daly confirmed Revenue is also probing some overseas property purchases by Irish people, which it suspects may have been bought with untaxed funds.

“We have been following through on cases where people have bought offshore. We are doing it on an individual basis and I wouldn’t like to overstate it.

“We are basing the investigations on information obtained from foreign property registers and from the industry here,” he said.