rip-off/how much tax do we pay?

...and which will take years to conclude during which time there would be a cast-iron political excuse to suspend all attempts to incrementally reform the system pending receipt of the report.
 
RainyDay said:
Sounds like a hugely expensive consultancy exercise which will result in yet another fat report to gather dust on a shelf.
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Would such an audit of the health service not be a suitable job for the CAG or do they restrict their attention to purely financial rather than organisational audits?
 
Going back to the original topic "how much tax do we pay?"

Does anyone know if there are any studies that take a look at the complete tax liability for people in Ireland? ie direct AND indirect taxes.

I think Clubman made the point, and I agree, was that direct taxes are not excessive - last year Mrs fm and I paid 33% of our total combined incomes on direct taxes. However, I don't know how much of our discretionary spending went on taxes / duties / rates.

If there was a study that took the average industrial wage and an average family buying an average basket of goods and services we could begin to look at the average overall tax burden on people in Ireland; once we had this we could then compare to similar studies for other countries.

efm
 
There might be some relevant reading here:
  • KPMG Tax Monitor - March 2005
  • The Eurostat survey/report mentioned in the above KPMG link may be available somewhere in [broken link removed] but I can't find it right now. As far as I recall this ranks EU countries based on direct, indirect, corporation and total tax takes.
  • Wikipedia Tax article
I haven't had a chance to read these myself yet.
 
Clubman,

Excellent links which, I think, bear out a lot about what you are saying about the actual levels of taxation in Ireland.

I think one of the key comments is this from the KPMG report:
The statistics show that Ireland has a taxation burden, as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP) of 31.2 per cent. The average for the EU is 41.5 per cent. Relative to our GDP, we are therefore more lightly taxed than are citizens and businesses in most EU States.
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Also, if you follow the wikipedia links through to the Forbes Tax Misery and Reform Index 2005 it has an intersting analysis of cumulative tax rates pre country which puts Ireland the 15th lowest out of 52 (France is the highest and UAE the lowest).

What I am still trying to find, and I may well have missed it, is a comparison of the ratio of personal and indirect taxes to the overall tax take across differing countries - ie we may have low overall tax rates, but are PAYE workers and direct tax payers paying a greater percentage of the tax take in Ireland than in other countries?

BTW Clubman - any huffing and puffing yet ? I hope you are bringing your laptop to the delivery ward so that you can keep in touch and keep posting those "Don't duplicate posts" posts !! :) (ps I looked for a smilie for gioving birth but couldn't find one)
 
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