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THERE has been a call for changes to the tax appeals regime after it emerged that thousands of taxpayers are in dispute with Revenue.

Such is the backlog that it could take up to 10 years to clear all the cases, the Irish Tax Institute said.
The institute said radical changes to how the appeals process works were needed.

It discovered that 4,000 appeals are in dispute, with half of these involving amounts of less than €10,000.
This implies that many of those in dispute are PAYE taxpayers and self-employed people.

“The Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) released a report last week, which found the value of cases under appeal at the Tax Appeals Commission has increased over the past two years,” said Irish Tax Institute president David Fennell.
“The C&AG Report said that at March 2017, the total value of tax appeals was €1.1bn,” Mr Fennell said.

Recent figures from Dáil questions show that this figure has now grown to €1.5bn, and totals 4,387 appeals, he said.
The institute said that there are currently 2,214 appeals, which relate to amounts of tax that are less than €10,000.

“These appeals account for half of all appeals in the system, yet they account for less than 1pc of the total amount of tax in dispute and are creating a large backlog of cases.
“Whereas at the larger scale, 50 appeals account for almost €1bn in value and they represent only 1pc of the number of appeals currently at the Tax Appeals Commission.”

Article Source: http://tinyurl.com/kbwqb42