130 top Irish earners each net €4m pay packet

Workers here earned €81bn in salaries last year, with 18% going straight to the Revenue Commissioners.

Returns show rich people paid a greater proportion of their incomes in tax compared to workers earning closer to the average industrial wage.

However, even where tax bills were proportionally progressive, the figures showed an enormous gap between the wealth of people at top and bottom of the economic ladder.

Some 130 of the highest paid people in the State chipped in €186m in tax and universal social charges. This was €16m more than the combined total for the 780,000 people who earned less than €20,000 in 2013.

This was because the 130 workers each earned in excess of €2m and took home a combined €527m — an average pay packet of €4m per person.

Another 549 people were paid between €1m -€2m, and together contributed €262m in tax and universal social charge.

The figures were revealed in a full breakdown of the income tax net provided to the Public Accounts Committee by Revenue.

This showed that in 2013 the State raised €15.2bn in income tax and universal social charge from all categories of workers.

Fewer than one in 20 workers earned more than €100,000. Yet together, these high earners accounted for 40% of the country’s tax revenues last year.

Within this cohort, people paid more than €1m a year fared better than those below that arbitrary threshold.

People who earned more than €1m a year gave 35% of their pay to the Revenue while those paid between €450,000 and €500,000 had to hand over 37%. This compared with a national average of 18%.

More than 2.1m people paid income taxes and universal social charges last year.

The majority of those (1.8m) earn less than €60,000 — a threshold the Labour Party used last year when it proposed cutting pension reliefs for high-income earners.

On average, workers in the category earning below €60,000 paid less than 20% of their pay on tax and universal social charges. However, because they made up 84% of the workforce, they were responsible for a third of the total income tax take.