As would be expected, the headline items are the increased yields from all taxheads, and increases in the numbers of taxpayers, but the report confirms some trends which accountants would have been aware of from anecdotal evidence.

Changes in Revenue audit activity are hard to distill because of the recategorisation of verification audits between years into “assurance checks”. It would seem, however, that there has been no significant increase in the number of traditional audits, however these might be described.

The analysis of Random Audits is instructive. Accountants will recall that this topic became a focus of scrutiny by the Comptroller and Auditor General some years ago, largely on the basis that the random audits weren't really random at all. The purpose of the random audit programme is to verify compliance levels outside of cases that become flagged for investigation for whatever reason.

While over 400 cases were randomly selected, 50 or so turned out to be dormant, and another 50 haven't been finalised, so we're looking at results from a sample of about 300. Of these, 200 yielded nothing, and it's fair to say that another 50 resulted in yields below the margin of error – if any taxpayer is examined carefully enough, some tax will be rattled out. So, with these taken out, it would appear that in over 10% of random cases, it was worth Revenue's while to take a close look. The yield bears this out – over €1m was garnered from the random programme. It should be noted, however, that the average yield from the random programme was only about a tenth of the yield from the focused audit programme.

More cases were referred to the Revenue Solicitor in 2005 than in 2004; 17,432 as compared to 12,637. One notable increase in activity was in the area of attachment orders, which more than doubled to 2,253 instances.

The report acknowledges that Customer Service during 2005 was not as it could have been, and the actions mentioned to resolve this situation are almost exclusively technology based.