In last week’s Tax Newsletter, we notified readers that we received an invitation to present before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, and Taoiseach as part of the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Finance (Tax Appeals and Fiscal Responsibility) Bill 2025. You can now watch that session in full here.
The invitation was received following our submission to the Committee in December. In our opening statement and in response to the questions raised by the Committee, we highlighted two fundamental concerns with the proposals in Head 5 of the Revised General Scheme of Finance (Tax Appeals and Fiscal Responsibility) Bill 2025, being the protection of taxpayer privacy and the shifting of power too far toward the State.
We expressed our unequivocal support for the protection of taxpayer privacy, and our position is that the right to elect for a private hearing should be preserved at the Tax Appeals Commission as a court of first instance. Tax appeals often involve deeply sensitive personal and financial information. For over a decade, taxpayers have had the right to request a private hearing at the TAC, with anonymised determinations still published to ensure transparency and accountability to the public. The legal principles underscoring a determination of the TAC are available to the public as it stands. Further, the nature of a Tax Appeal is that all information is provided at the outset of an appeal. A key reason for administering justice in public is to enable the public to provide information to ensure justice can be achieved. However, in the case of tax appeals, this requirement has already been satisfied by the legal obligations of taxpayers under the Tax Acts. There obligations demand complete transparency of all financial information to Revenue for the purposes of filing an accurate and complete tax return.
We also expressed our grave concerns that shifting balance of power toward the State risks undermining the spirit of voluntary compliance that underscores the entire self-assessment model. Removing the taxpayer’s right to elect for a private hearing risks deterring compliant taxpayers from seeking independent adjudication of Revenue’s legal interpretations thereby eroding trust and transparency and undermining confidence in the overall appeals process. Paradoxically, those who deliberately default may still protect their privacy where they are seen to cooperate with Revenue, while compliant taxpayers will now likely lose that right in most cases.
The proposed amendments draw on the Supreme Court’s decision in Zalewski v the Workplace Relations Commission. However, that case involved an absolute ban on public hearings; the Tax Appeal Commission is already public by default. The proposals go far beyond what the Constitution requires—and in doing so, places taxpayer rights in the hands of a quasi-judicial body, rather than preserving the longstanding statutory protections afforded to compliant taxpayers. At a time when voluntary compliance underpins our self‑assessment system, it is vital that taxpayers retain a meaningful, reliable right to privacy in tax matters. The proposed amendments would significantly undermine that principle.
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