Medical consultant loses appeal over €320,000 tax bill

Dr Strangelove said:
The article said that this was what triggered the Revenue audit in the first place.

A locum hospital consultant isn’t an entrepreneur. They don’t have many purchases and another director can only be doing so much.
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I think you're misunderstanding - the audit wouldn't be triggered if there was a low salary AND a large (taxed, at CT rates) profit in the company. But when you have a very small salary AND very large expense deductions, in a company that effectively is the conduit for a professional's earnings, then the alarm bells ring. And rightly so, as exemplified in the outcome of this case.

An audit is triggered by things that may indicate the RISK of messing having happened, not with the preconceived conclusion that it definitely has happened. The audit is the means of finding that out.

And without wanting to put words in Gordon's mouth, I think his point is that Revenue can't "challenge" a small salary, as that's something that is entirely at the discretion of the company and its directors / employees - they can't go in and dictate that for tax purposes, a salary that legally and factually hasn't been drawn, must be drawn / taxed as if drawn. It's also not what has happened in this doctor's case - in this case the money left the company, via a purported payment of salary to someone else and via the company paying a rake of travel and subsistence type expenses to / on behalf of the doctor herself.

Those are two distinct things dealt with separately under the appeal. The purported salary couldn't be credibly evidenced as having found its way to the party supposed to have been paid it (they're in another country, and the money was taken out of the bank in Ireland, in cash, and supposedly physically delivered back to this person by other people who were travelling that way... ). This amounted to nearly 110k across the years under dispute.

The much larger amount of money, in excess of 260k, related to expenses paid by the company to / on behalf of the doctor across the several years. This appears to have been accommodation, mileage between home and the hospitals she worked at, and daily subsistence. There's been several TAC cases in the last decade, and a big body of case law stretching back nearly a century (primarily UK cases) that make it clear that someone working through their own company as a locum like this person was, cannot have these types of expenses paid / reimbursed tax free by their company.
 
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