The Revenue Commissioners made unpublished tax settlements of more than €1.36 billion last year, new figures reveal.
The enormous tax haul related to 62,418 separate disclosures, Revenue said, though more than €1 billion of the total related to a small number of cases.
They said the top 20 unpublished settlements were worth €1.052 billion — an average of about €52.6 million each.
That meant the other 62,398 settlements were valued at about €311 million, or an average of about €5,000 in each case.
Revenue said it would not provide any further individual detail on the scale of the highest settlements, saying it had concerns over “taxpayer confidentiality”.
“To release the details of the 20 largest settlements by amount could potentially lead to the identification of individual taxpayers,” it said.
Revenue said it had introduced a new compliance intervention framework in May this year to provide a “consistent graduated response” to taxpayer behaviour.
This allowed for a range of action from extensive opportunities to voluntarily correct mistakes up to the pursuit of criminal sanctions for serious cases of tax evasion.
“Taxpayers who avail of these opportunities will experience the minimum level of penalty and generally not risk either publication or prosecution,” a Revenue spokesperson said.
She said there were several circumstances in which individuals or companies making tax settlements could avoid the published quarterly list of tax defaulters.
This happened where a taxpayer made a qualifying disclosure to Revenue, which included a declaration as well as payment of the tax and interest due for late payment.
She said legislation also allowed that they would not publish cases where the tax settlement figure was less than €50,000, and in other related circumstances.
Cases where a “qualifying avoidance disclosure” were made or where a tax-avoidance surcharge is incurred are also not published, the spokeswoman said.
