The Gazette 1985

GAZETTE

SEPTEMBER 1985

Correspondence The Editor, Law Society Gazette, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7.

and effectiveness in the very altered circumstances of today. A hundred years ago, apart from lands or house property, it was in goods and chattels that a person's wealth lay, and a sheriffs task of levying by seizure and sale was relatively easy. Today, wealth lies in income, in investments and in bank deposits, and almost everyone lives and trades on credit in one form or another. I could enlarge on this topic at very great length — enough to take up several pages of your Gazette. However, I expect that your professional readership is already, from its ineffectual efforts to collect on foot of Fi.Fa.s and other Execution Orders in the sheriffs' hands, already well enough aware of the weakness of the system not to need any more detailed exposition here. Those who wish to pursue the subject further will find it very fully dealt with in the issue of your contemporary, "Stubbs Gazette", dated 10th April last. Ineffective as the sheriff system has shown itself to be in the enforcement of collection of ordinary civil debts, it was, or should have been, unthinkable that it would ever work in the vastly larger field of tax collection, at least without drastic overhaul and the injection of greatly increased staff numbers. It will not work. I have said that again and again until I am almost blue in the face, to Government Ministers and their officials, to the Revenue Commissioners, to the Committee on Taxation, to Seminars of the Law Society and in other places. I would not bore your readers with its repetition now, were it not for the fact that I considered that your leader called for comment and since there must still be some who have not got the message. Yours, etc., T.G. Crotty, Solicitor, 45 Parliament St., Kilkenny. Dear Sir, I refer to the Comment in your issue of June, 1985, which addressed itself to the matter of deposits and payments on account to builders in respect of houses in the course of construction. The comment stated that the Law Society and the Dublin Solicitors Bar Association had continuously criticised the failure of the Scheme to include protection for deposits and payments on account paid to builders. The comment concluded by stating that it was past time that the Irish Scheme came into line with that of the United Kingdom. Our organisation has, from its inception, stated clearly what its warranty offered to purchasers. I find it an interesting use (or abuse) of the English language that because we are not doing what others would wish us to do, partly for their protection, that this is classified as a 'failure' on our part. Readers may not be aware of the fact that discussions have taken place recently with representatives of the Law Society when we outlined our views on deposit cover and The Editor, Law Society Gazette, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7. 31 July, 1985

6 August 1985

"Only Collect"

Dear Sir, The leading article under the above title, in your June issue, while a useful contribution to the ongoing debate on our existing tax collection system, fails to get to the root of the matter. Your leader-writer says "The failure of the State to collect Revenue is a major defect of our tax system", and, later, "The efficient collection of revenue is a duty which the State owes to those in the PAYE sector and to those outside it who pay their tax promptly". I could not agree more. But the root of the matter is that so long as the State continues to rely mainly on the outmoded, inefficient and, indeed virtually inoperative sheriff law for the enforcement of collection of tax arrears, than so long will the State be failing in its duty to collect outstanding revenue, and so long will those in the PAYE sector, and those outside who pay their tax promptly continue to suffer quite unnecessarily heavy tax burdens. The idea of equating a Certificate of the Collector- General with an Order of Fi.Fa of the High Court, and directing that it should be levied in the same manner, i.e. by seizure and sale of the defaulter's goods and chattels was misconceived from the outset. It was not, so far as I am aware, preceded by any investigation of the efficiency of that mode of enforcement, nor by any survey of the capability of the existing Sheriffs, or, more importantly of the County Registrars who discharge the sheriff function in 24 of our 26 counties, to discharge the duty with the resources at their disposal. And by resources I am not referring only to staff numbers, since the four remaining Sheriffs, who are paid by results, can increase their staffs to meet the demands of their work, and it is open to the Department of Justice to provide additional staff for the County Registrars' offices as the need arises. That, of course, is not to imply that the Department has done this — by and large and with minor exceptions, outside the Dublin office, County Registrars' staffs remain at the same strength as they were 30 years ago, despite the enormous increase in workload. No, when I speak of the resources at the disposal of the enforcing officers, I refer rather to the inherent weakness in the law which provides only for enforcing payment by seizure and sale of a debtor's goods, which is an outdated and ineffective concept in today's society. As I have said more than once before, one only has to look at the law relating to the sheriff system to appreciate this view. The only Irish textbook on the subject was published in 1888 and has never been revised since — it has not seriously needed revision because, apart from some minor amendments wrought by an Act of 1926, the law remains as it was when Dixon & Gilliland was published. Any system of enforcement which was set up to operate in 19th (and earlier) century trading and business conditions must necessarily have lost most of its relevance

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