The Revenue Annual Report for 2010 outlines the Commissioners’ activities in most areas, including banking and financial services.

According to the report, Revenue is targeting risk in the financial sector including claims for loss relief, bad debts, value-added tax and payroll tax liabilities. Audits yielded a figure in 2010 of some 12 million from this activity. It wasn't just the institutions that came to the attention of Revenue. They have also chased some 300 directors and management level employees in the six main financial institutions. While most of these enquiries have closed, apparently €1.3 million in tax has been collected from this group.

It also seems that the anti-money-laundering suspicious transaction reports (STRs) are featuring more in Revenue enquiries. The report notes that some 13,000 such STRs are provided to Revenue by financial institutions and other designated bodies. The report also notes that the automated audit case selection programme known as REAP is being modified to better reflect the significance of STRs received.

Furthermore in relation to REAP, the report notes that it is now accommodating additional third-party data. This data includes information from the Taxi Regulator, details regarding the non-principal private residence levy and also information from the Private Residential Tenancies Board.

It will come as no surprise to accountants in practice that the number of assurance checks – that is single topic enquiry letters and requests have increased again significantly from 361,000 during 2009 to 455,000 in 2010. While assurance checks cover a whole range of activities, including certain customs checks, the impact for self-assessed taxpayers is significant. The notion behind assurance checks is to provide additional evidence or otherwise for a full-blown audit to take place, and it would be expected that the number of audit interventions would reduce as assurance checks increase. The number of audits has decreased from some 12,500 in 2009 to 11,000 in 2010. Nevertheless, dealing with assurance checks does create a compliance obligation on taxpayers, which may not be fully counterbalanced by the reduction in the number of audits taking place.

In the wake of the introduction of the Mandatory Disclosure Regime, it might be expected that Revenue would focus on challenges to tax avoidance schemes. These schemes investigated are only described in the broadest terms. It would seem that some €140 million of tax was at issue in relation to aggressive tax avoidance schemes.

The use of the Revenue Online Service (ROS) for submitting returns now appears to be almost universal. Over 3.2 million returns of various types were filed electronically through ROS in 2010. This included almost 387,000 Forms 11 and some 120,000 Forms CT1. Equally, there was significant increase in the number of payments through ROS. The number of payment transactions increased by over 12% and Revenue now collect most of their money through ROS – the 2010 figure being €27.66 billion.

Just as the tax figures are down, so too is the volume of business being transacted by Revenue. There were 200,000 fewer callers to Revenue offices in 2010 as compared to 2009. Maybe this is partly explained by the increase in visits to the Revenue website which were up about 40%. In addition, activity levels across all the major items of correspondence were down. Fewer income tax repayments, corporation tax repayments and value-added tax repayments were made during 2010 in comparison with the earlier year. Among the categories of activity down the most were Relevant Contracts Tax (RCT) work items, as would be expected.

In a new departure, Table 29 of the report lists the number of representations received by the Revenue Chairman's office from public representatives in 2010. It seems that the former Minister for Finance Mr Brian Lenihan acted as a virtual clearinghouse for representations as the vast majority of representations made by him were initiated by other elected representatives. Aside from Mr Lenihan, only the then Taoiseach Mr Cowen made a double figures number of representations. It seems however, that most TDs do not write to the Revenue Chairman.

Revenue's Annual Report for 2010 is published on their website and available at http://www.revenue.ie/en/press/2011/pr-200411-annual-report2010.html