Following a pattern established last year, Revenue published some key performance metrics for 2008 on 9 January last. No surprises that the tax yields are down, but equally timely compliance rates are down for smaller taxpayers by a full twelve percentage points.

Compliance rates are measured under three categories, large, medium and other. The first two categories apparently have held up, but timely compliance among taxpayers with a liability of less than €75,000 has dropped from 83% (both in 2006 and 2007) to 71%. So about one in eight of “ordinary” taxpayers aren't as diligent as they used to be.

Against that backdrop you'd expect collection enforcement to have increased, and it has but not by much. Some 3,000 more recalcitrants were subjected to solicitor and sheriff enforcement in 2008 over 2007, but that only restored the overall figures to 2006 levels.

Both the number of Revenue audits and the resulting yield have dropped, the former by about 8% and the latter twice as much. There's a €120m drop from the fall-off in the number of audits.

Assurance checks however have rocketed – up from 237,000 to 345,000. Nevertheless the yield from such checks has only increased by €17m. There is a cost to business in dealing with assurance checks, which in many cases would far exceed the pro-rata yield to Revenue (and thus, ultimately, reduce the Exchequer's tax take). If it were clear that the assurance checks were having a positive effect on compliance, that would be one thing, but Revenue's figures suggest otherwise. It begs the question as to the effect REAP, Revenue's computerized screening system, is having. It also begs the question of how successful our tax self assessment regime is, if we are heading towards a direct equivalence between the number of self assessed taxpayers and the number of assurance checks carried out.

If the tax yield is reflective of the 2005 position, is the tax administration becoming reflective of the 1987/88 position, prior to the introduction of self assessment?

Prosecution activity was fairly static, as was activity (as would be expected) from the Special Investigations.