Madam, – I should like to express my admiration for Mr Richard Murphy’s letter of January 26th. I agree with most of it. Undoubtedly a saintly accountant with plenty of spare time and a large private income could derive immense job satisfaction from the pursuit of “unacceptable” practices; but unfortunately there is a shortage of saints at the moment, and the supply is likely to dry up if the recession gets worse.
One problem here, never stated in public, is that the usual reward for a firm that pursues unacceptable practices with undue zeal is the boot.
At the purely technical level there could be a tightening up of regulations. For example, it could be made obligatory in both company law and accountancy practice for an auditor to certify that he or she has audited all transactions with the directors’ current accounts (not to be confused with bank accounts), including all transfers into and out of these accounts.
The Revenue also should be concerned with such transfers since they can have tax implications. A searchlight should be trained upon the searchers. The Revenue should be required to break up its annual statistics of tax audits into small, medium and large concerns; the latter should also be broken up between banks, semi-states and big business.
Regarding tax audits of banks, the Revenue should be asked if these cover transfers or transactions involving directors’ current accounts, and if not, why not.
Apart from all these considerations there is a widespread feeling that disproportionate attention is given in tax audits to small firms. More detailed statistics and answers to questions such as the above would help to lay this bogey to rest. Why are these questions not being asked in the Dáil? Is it because of a lack of tax expertise? – Yours, etc,