Annual reports from Government Departments tend to be wordy, selfcongratulatory tomes so there's a lot to be said for the tabular, almost staccato approach of Revenue this year as they summarise their efforts for 2008. There's little in it though which will be news to Chartered Accountants either in business or in practice.

From the public interest perspective, perhaps the most significant element of the Report is that the slippage in tax revenues is being matched by a slippage in compliance levels. Medium and large case compliance (broadly those cases paying more than €75,000 across all tax heads) seems to have held up, but the picture is not as clear for other cases. Direct comparisons year on year are not provided, apparently because of changes in the way the different sizes of case are categorised. It would seem that compliance figures for smaller cases lag behind the larger taxpayers, and that the gap is growing.

The number of audits conducted between 2007 and 2008 dropped, but other forms of Revenue enquiry increased significantly, from 252,000 to 361,000. This reflects the profession's experience of a large increase in queries from the Revenue regions. Nevertheless, the yields from these types of compliance enforcement activity were down 15%. Because of the overall decline in taxes collected, it would be wrong to categorically conclude that this suggests intervention is not being targeted correctly. However there is a cost to business in dealing with Revenue queries which are not contributing to taxes collected.

The decline in economic activity is reflected in the volumes of items processed by Revenue during 2008. CGT returns and CG50 applications declined by 50% between 2007 and 2008. New vehicle registrations declined by a fifth – second hand registrations were up marginally, and as a consequence the ratio between new and second hand registrations during 2008 is almost 50:50. Equally though, applications for tax refunds show significant increases, and unfortunately these increases are not matched by the increases in customer service standards in processing them.

Mutual assistance requests, where other countries (almost exclusively EU member states) request information on tax matters from Revenue, more than doubled last year and it seems that some of this increase can be attributed to activity against VAT carousel fraud.