"28th Jul 1998 - Tax 1996-97. Date payable, 30/04/98. Amount £811.13
"A Chara, - The tax shown above remains outstanding. You are reminded that arrears of tax incur interest charges which will continue to run until payment. You are also reminded if the tax is not paid when due then collection may be enforced with costs.
"If you have paid within recent days, this request may be ignored. - Mise, le meas, Liam J. Irwin,
Collector General."
Needless to say, this was not a letter to AIB from the Revenue Commissioners, but one to me, PAYE payer and eejit, and it was not even accurate. When this threatening letter - "collection may be enforced with costs" - was written, far from me owing the Revenue Commissioners money, they owed me money.
Now. What is the relationship here? Who is the public servant and who is the public? Does the tone of that letter in any sense convey who should expect respect and politeness, or who is the employer of whom? It does not; it manages, quite astoundingly, to reverse the roles. Far from being a member of the public who is entitled to courtesy, indeed deference, from State employees whose salaries I help to pay with monthly deductions at source from my own salary, I am turned into a feckless and untrustworthy debtor who needs to be coerced into paying my dues.
A mere cipher
So naturally the word "please" is conspicuous by its absence in this letter. So too is my name. I am a mere cipher to be threatened, bullied and cajoled into coughing up money to the central Exchequer. Such was the tone of the letter, such was the brutish menace it conveyed - and only three months after the alleged payment date - that, unadvised, I would simply have handed over the money in question. But my accountant assured me that the Revenue Commissioners were wrong: I didn't owe them, they owed me - and a good deal more than £800.
What is going on here? How would Liam J. Irwin feel if I wrote to him as he has written to me? I could have done - the Revenue Commissioners were then in debt to me, not the other way round. What would his reaction be if I threatened to enforce collection, presumably by the confiscation of assets, with the cost of confiscation added to the bill? How would he feel if American Express or Visa wrote so threateningly over a relatively small amount of money when he was making monthly payments to them directly from his salary, inescapably, repeatedly, had been doing so for years, and would continue to do so for the rest of his working life?
Benefactor
But, of course, this is not about manners, but about power. That letter tells us all we need to know about who is powerful and who is not; who deserves respect and who does not; who feels in authority and who does not. There is no sense at all that in this relationship I am the paymaster; none whatever. There is no sense because the Revenue Commissioners have created an inverted culture in which the benefactor - the taxpayer - is transformed into a miscreant, and his employee, the taxman, becomes a stern and unbending policeman righting wrong.
All this would be bad enough if we felt that everybody was being treated like that; but it is clearly not the case. We read astonishing stories now that AIB had a large tax liability over bogus non-resident accounts. A question to Liam J. Irwin, or Dermot Quigley, Chairman of the Revenue Commissioners: did you or your associates once, just once, ever send a letter to the bright lads and lasses of AIB over the missing millions such as the one you sent me over the £800 you - wrongly - said I owed you? Did you? Do you ever address such people with the witless Civil Servicese, "A Chara"? Do you ever threaten collection from AIB with costs? And if you don't, why not?
No doubt we PAYE workers are a contemptible shower. We pay higher taxes than the employees of the Revenue Commissioners do - the tax is disguised as PRSI - and our pensions, unlike those of our public servants, will not increase with every pay award to the PAYE sector we have retired from. We get no return on the higher PRSI we pay. We work, we pay more tax, we take no uncertificated sick days every year, we get threatening tax letters, we get no apologies, and we don't complain.
Avoiding tax
Now we learn of an entire section of society which has been avoiding savings tax, with the banks and the Revenue Commissioners effectively turning a blind eye. Why? Is it because money comes in so easily from the PAYE eejits that it not worth the legal bother and political hassle of going after the banks? Is it because you can bully and threaten and frighten plain people more easily than you can the smooth and suited mandarins who run the banks?
Very well. We might be fair game. But the least the fair game deserves is a bit of courtesy. Please, thank you, sorry, that sort of stuff, you know?
If you have amended your manners in recent days, this request may be ignored. - Mise, le meas, Kevin E. Myers, Eejit.