It might be imagined that the Revenue Commissioners had a lot on their minds, what with the operations of Ansbacher Cayman, the involvement of the major banks and building societies in a massive DIRT fraud, and a climate in which a would-be TD was telling her banking clients not to bother paying their taxes. If some of these things escaped their scrutiny for a long time, however, the same could not be said for the shenanigans of one notorious family who threatened the integrity of the taxation system.
We all know the sort: people so greedy and selfish that they offer a loving foster home to a profoundly mentally and physically handicapped girl. Working the system as such high-flyers tend to do, this couple claimed tax relief on the cost of adapting their car so that they could drive their foster daughter to the day centre she attended. Unfortunately, the law allows for this kind of thing, so they couldn't be stopped.
Eventually, however, they went too far. They had an accomplice, a woman who gave them a break by providing respite care for the girl. This woman, too, bought a specially-adapted car so she could bring the girl to the day centre. She, too, wanted tax relief on the cost of adapting the vehicle. Here, thanks to the vigilance of the authorities, the scheme unravelled. The law specified that the recipient of the tax relief be "a family member residing with and responsible for the transportation of the person with the disability". How could the girl be "residing with" two different families in two different houses? Was she not, in fact, a bogus non-resident? The tax relief was denied.
As outlined in his office's annual report this week, the Ombudsman, Kevin Murphy, got involved. He asked the Revenue Commissioners to review the case. They told him that the decision to refuse tax relief was correct, which, in a strict legalistic sense, it probably was. Prompted by the Ombudsman's concern, however, the tax authorities decided to make a generous "once-off" concession. In this case, and this case only, they would allow the woman who provides the respite care to claim the relief provided that the foster parents undertook not to make any new claim under the scheme for at least two years.
The grand sum of money at issue in all of this was £2,048 in VAT and Vehicle Registration Tax on the respite carer's car. Suppose, at a stretch, that there are 10,000 people in the State so generous that, out of the goodness of their hearts, they use specially-adapted cars for transporting children with severe disabilities who are not normally part of their families. That's £20,000 - the kind of sum an Ansbacher man might cheerily have lost on the horses at Fairyhouse this week. Even in the context of what it would cost the taxpayer to provide proper State transport, it hardly deserves to be called a pittance.
THE OMBUDSMAN'S report is full of this kind of petty cruelty. Take, for example, the 81-year-old man being cared for by his daughter. He becomes ill and is admitted to hospital. His condition is successfully treated, but the consultant feels that his daughter will not be able to provide the necessary nursing care after he is discharged. He insists that the man go straight from hospital to a nursing home for a few weeks. The hospital makes the arrangements, assuring the daughter that she will be entitled to a subvention to cover the cost. Since the hospital is run by the South-Eastern Health Board, which also pays the nursing home subventions, her mind is at rest.
Unfortunately, the old man doesn't get better and, instead of staying for weeks in the nursing home, he is there for three months until his death. Faced with the bills, his daughter applies for the promised subvention. Too late, says the South-Eastern Health Board, you have to apply before the patient is admitted to the nursing home. Otherwise, you can't apply for two years. They don't tell her that the law makes provision for emergency admissions and allows considerable discretion to the CEO of the health board. As far as she is told, nothing can be done. They stonewall until eventually, after the Ombudsman's office gets involved, they relent. The money which would have been saved for the State if the South-Eastern Health Board had not been forced to think again was £1,646.
Almost always, it's the little people who bear the full majesty of the law in all its rigour and righteousness. Like the woman who applied in 1995 to buy her house under the Tenant Purchase Scheme. She was told over the phone that her application could not proceed because the kind of house she occupied was not eligible. Fair enough, except that what she was told was simply wrong. Eventually, after queries from the Ombudsman, the council admitted that it had misled her. It would rectify its mistake by agreeing to sell her the house. But it was now 1998, and the price had leaped ahead since 1995. She would have to pay for the council's mistake by handing over the inflated 1998 value of the house. Only after further extensive representations by the Ombudsman did they agree to sell her the house at the 1995 price.
What all of these cases, and many more outlined in the report, suggest is that a kind of "and the office boy kicked the dog" syndrome is at work in the relationship between the State and citizens. Values which ought to be at the core of public service - probity, legality, the protection of public money - have been so thoroughly abused that they are expressed in a weirdly distorted way. The factors that qualify them are not humanity, compassion and common sense, but the double standards which let the powerful off the hook while the powerless are impaled on it. Unable to apply the rules to the rich, the system compensates itself at the expense of the poor.
fotoole@irish-times.ie
