Interesting insight into Revenue's "ethos"

[broken link removed]

Overall Approach

14. In summary then Chairman, the hallmarks of our service to PAYE taxpayers are;

• There is no need for claim forms for most credits; any suggestion of “one claim, one form” (the Irish Taxation Institute’s proposal) would in fact be a backward step and out of tune with Revenue’s more modern thinking.
• Our philosophy regarding credits is (wherever possible) “claim once, keep forever”. This works well for standard credits with fixed amounts, where a person’s circumstances are unlikely to change from year to year. Any suitable credit, once allowed, is generally carried forward from year to year by the Revenue computer system.
• We operate a self-assessment ethic – we assume people are honest and allow them to claim their due. A small proportion of claims are checked.
• Relatively few PAYE income tax returns (Forms 12) are issued or required. 95% of workers never need to complete one.
• Where we do require a form to back-up a claim, we generally “prompt” the claimant to complete the form every year. For example, anyone who claimed medical expenses relief in excess of €1,000, will get a claim form in the post every year. The same thing happens where an elderly person claims DIRT exemption.
• As already mentioned, claims for refunds are prioritised as indeed are requests to get people off emergency tax.

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That is very interesting. I think that the Revenue is very well organized.

It is a huge complex administrative problem and their IT systems are World Class.

I thought the reaction last week was very interesting to the mistake they made. They deducted money through Revenue Online twice through human error. They noticed it themselves first. They reversed it immediately and said that they would compensate anyone who lost out as a result.

The guy from ISME came on ranting and raving about small businesses being damaged by this. Their cheques would bounce as the money would not be in the bank to meet them and years of building up a credit record would be destroyed forever. By comparison, the Irish Tax Institute came out and said something along the lines of: "Human error. Happens very rarely and the Revenue have dealt with it well."

Brendan said:

their IT systems are World Class.

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Ummm.... Any change they will fix the problem there they can't handle multiple employments with the same employer in the same tax year.
I was told it was going to be fixed when they got their new Bull mainframe, and that was not today or yesterday. I could go on...

A colleague of mine had a cynical interpretation of the statement:

"only an idiot wouldn't be able to fill in the forms, and an idiot wouldn't be earning enough to need to"

I think its a little sad that Revenue have to be more proactive in getting people to make claims. Its quite sad to think that we are such a lazy nation that some would rather be told what we can claim by advisors instead of being able to do it ourselves. Admittedly some of the complications of the tax system doesn't help but Revenue are more than happy to try and help.

With regard to the Revenue IT systems, I can only agree that their systems are amazing. The use of ROS to file returns has made filings an awful lot simpler for the anyone who could be bothered to do their own return.

Well my cynical view is that, reading the above excerpt, Revenue like to single out the elderly and the infirm! Luckily, this is not a side of my nature that comes out very often.

Ummm.... Any change they will fix the problem there they can't handle multiple employments with the same employer in the same tax year.
I was told it was going to be fixed when they got their new Bull mainframe, and that was not today or yesterday. I could go on...

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I found this irritating as well when doing the P35. But we use CollSoft payroll and they have some form of merge facility which fixes it at the employer's side.

I am astonished at the smartness of their ROS system generally.

Brendan

Brendan said:

I found this irritating as well when doing the P35. But we use CollSoft payroll and they have some form of merge facility which fixes it at the employer's side.

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Brendan said:

I am astonished at the smartness of their ROS system generally.

Brendan

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Merging is fine if all the payrolls are run from the one site. Well apart from the fact that you have to use the earliest start date and last finish date. So for example if you work for a company for a couple of weeks each Christmas, it looks as if you have been employed for the year. But just have 2 or 3 insurable weeks!
If you have offices all over the country with their own payrolls, or management and factory payrolls with the factory payroll run in house and management run by the accountants, when add one or two employees moving between payrolls. You have a mess with different people having to send files to be merged or flagging them as Supplementary or waiting until ROS's duplicated file check expires.

I have still not gotten an answer as to what happens when you send in an 'Original' and 'Supplementary' P35 with an employee duplicated (this is what Revenue recommends), it gets around the ROS validation, but if their main system uses [Tax Year] + [Employer No.] + [PPS Number] as a unique primary key, then changes are the record is getting discarded at the point ROS updates the main frame. The problem is all the programming is now subcontracted. But if it is a problem, I am sure the answer will come out of the wood work this year.

Towger