Revenue's list of tax defaulters: what it says, and what it does not

Revenue publishes a list of tax defaulters four times a year. It is one of the few places where an Irish company's tax behaviour becomes public, so it is worth knowing what is on it — and worth being precise about what it does not mean.

What it is

Under the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997, Revenue publishes a quarterly list of tax defaulters in Iris Oifigiúil, the State gazette, and on its own website. It comes in two parts: people and businesses on whom a court imposed a fine or other penalty, and settlements Revenue reached where the statutory conditions for publication are met — broadly, a settlement above a threshold where the taxpayer did not make a qualifying disclosure.

Each entry names the taxpayer, gives an address and an occupation or line of business, the amount, and what the default was — under-declared VAT, PAYE, income tax, and so on. A settlement that was disclosed voluntarily, or that falls below the threshold, is not published at all: absence from the list is not a clean bill of health.

What it is not

Some EU member states run a register of unreliable VAT payers, where buying from a listed supplier makes you liable for the VAT they fail to remit. Ireland does not. An entry on the defaulters list is a published fact about a past settlement or penalty; it does not transfer a liability to that taxpayer's customers, and it does not make their VAT number invalid.

It is also historical by construction. A settlement published this quarter concerns years that are already closed, and the business may have traded normally throughout. Read it as a fact about the past, not a status in the present.

Matching an entry to a company

This is the hard part, and the reason a defaulters list is more difficult to use than it looks. Entries carry a name and an address — not a CRO number. Matching one to a company on the register is a judgement, and two businesses with similar names at similar addresses are common enough that a confident automatic match would be wrong often enough to matter.

So treat a match as a question rather than a conclusion: check the name against the registered name, the address against the registered office, and the occupation against the company's recorded activity. Where they line up, ask. Where they do not, you have found a different taxpayer with a similar name.

How to use it

As one input among several. The filing history at the CRO tells you whether a company meets its obligations; a live VIES check tells you whether its VAT number is good today; the defaulters list tells you whether Revenue has published a settlement against a name that may or may not be the same business. Each answers a different question, and none of them answers all three.