People with Off-Shore Accounts to Face Jail

L

Leper

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. . . . like that's going to happen. I think not. We couldn't jail the people who brought the country to its knees and now we're taking on people with off-shore accounts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Somebody's having a laugh!
 
Can we at least be careful with the terminology?

I have an offshore account...should I be jailed?

There are entirely legitimate reasons for having an account outside of Ireland which are a world away from gombeen men bringing suitcases of cash to the Isle of Man or whitecollar crime.
 
I don't want to see them actually in jail. Jailing someone costs money and it's not like we have an excess of capacity. Apparently, these people have reserves of money, so pick them up, and shake them down for every last cent. Let's hope the threat of jail is enough to make them pony up.
 
Gordon Gekko said:
Which people?
Click to expand...

Gombeen men. The kind of people who, during the second world war emergency, petitioned the government for permission for exemption from the limits of the number of pockets permitted on a man's suit.
The kind of people whose motto is "no income tax, no vat, why do only fools and horses work?"
 
Where is this coming from? On the annual income tax return there is a space to notify Revenue of any new off-shore accounts opened, so it is not illegal to have one, or ten!
 

Revenue sectoral monitoring, technology and better documentation of transactions mean that this sort of guy is now largely a thing of the past. Undislosed offshore accounts are today largely the preserve of the criminal fuel launderer or drug pusher. As conventional policing struggles to collar these characters, the authorities are quite correctly resorting to enhanced tax enforcement to bring them to justice.
 
Or the guy with a Spanish or Portuguese current account to pay the utilities on his holiday home who Revenue will probably devote time and effort to chasing...this is PR and spin. The gombeen men with cash aren't being facilitated by offshore banks anymore. Compliance has put an end to that.
 
To be fair, we have to give a lot of credit to revenue and politicians (some) who have brought in laws that caught an awful lot of people who weren't paying tax and a huge amount of money was/is gathered for the state. It was brought to a head when 2 journalists uncovered the banks advising people on different ways to avoid paying dirt and the rest as they say is history. The only bad note in this was that the banks were let off very, very, lightly, as they were the instigators of the devious methods but were given leniency and by their standards a small fine providing they gave the revenue the names of the clients they advised, which they did.

As for sending people to jail? No, I feel that by taking large amounts of dosh from them is a lovely, sanitised, clinical way to educate their minds. On another note, has anyone else been slightly surprised by the huge percentage of the male population who get their names published for all those tax offences? Very, very, very, few ladies on those lists and i'm sure it's not because the male is the supposed breadwinner. Just a thought?
 
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Nothing but a hunch but I'd guess that this reflects the reality that Revenue and tax law both routinely treat husbands rather than wives as the assessable spouse for income tax purposes.

Geraldine Gilligan won this case against Revenue: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/judgment-reserved-in-geraldine-gilligan-tax-case-1.45405
 
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