I want to call attention to the methods, or I should say the want of method, adopted by the Revenue Commissioners in the matter of the collection of income tax from national teachers. Of course, nobody likes to pay income tax, and if it were a matter of ordinary complaints or the ordinary grumbles one hears from income taxpayers I would not trouble the Dáil by raising the matter. But it was only when the complaints reached such a stage that it was evident that there was some considerable chaos and confusion in this particular branch of the Income Tax Department that I thought it necessary to bring it to the notice of the Minister and of the Dáil. There are two methods adopted for collecting tax from the teachers. First, there is the ordinary way, the ordinary local income tax collector, and then there is the method which is being adopted recently whereby the Revenue Commissioners send an order to the Education Office to stop from the teacher's salary the amount of tax which they say is due. A considerable amount of overlapping as between the two Departments has resulted from this, and there are cases where teachers have paid their income tax locally, but at the same time the tax is deducted from them at the Education Office.
During the years 1919, 1920 and 1921 a considerable amount of arrears accumulated in the case of the teachers as in the case of other income taxpayers, and I can only say that so far as this collection is concerned now I am afraid that the Revenue Commissioners cannot hold that the promises given by the President and the Minister for Finance here that the collection of these arrears would be reasonable, and that no undue hardship would be inflicted on the taxpayer, have been kept in the case of the teachers. I could quote numerous instances where anything from 50 to 75 per cent. of the salary was stopped, instances in the case of teachers whose salaries are from £20 to £25, with anything from £12 to £15 a month stopped. That was a very great hardship, and I think that a much more reasonable attitude should have been adopted in the collection of arrears. That promise was given to us, and it has certainly not been carried out in the case of collection from the teachers. One general complaint that I received, and I received numerous complaints, is that appeals and explanations with regard to wrongful assessments are not listened to. All the heed that is given is that the teacher generally gets a card saying that the matter will be attended to.
The majority of these complaints which have reached me fall into three or four heads. There is first the class that I have mentioned, of deductions by the local inspector and stoppages of the same amount by the Department. In some cases where arrears are due, the teacher has gone to the local tax inspector, has discussed his case with him, and they have come to an arrangement whereby £4, £5 or £6 per month would be paid. That has gone on and all parties are satisfied, but suddenly, without any notice whatsoever, the teacher finds that this arrangement has been forgotten, and the amount of arrears due has been stopped from the salary before it left the Education Office. Then you have the case of teachers who were assessed and whose tax was deducted, although they had no liability whatsoever. Numerous cases of that kind are turning up, and all the appeals and explanations seem to have no effect on the local inspector; the next thing the teacher finds is that the amount has been stopped at the source. Then there are cases where the incorrect amount has been deducted, in spite of assessment. The teacher may have been assessed for one particular sum, or the assessment may have been amended to a particular sum, but quite a different sum altogether is deducted at the source.
Then you have cases where there is no assessment whatsoever, and no demand or information about the period for which the sum is deducted. In the first instance, the teacher writes to the Education Office. They have nothing to do except to carry out the orders of the Revenue Commissioners, and they know nothing whatsoever about the amount stopped, or as to how it has been arrived at. All they do is to stop the sum they are asked to stop and hand it over to the Revenue Commissioners. The teacher then writes to the Revenue Commissioners and he gets the usual postcard, but very seldom anything else. I took up several of these cases and there were a few in which assessments were made after very much delay, and things were straightened out. But in the majority of the cases that I brought to the notice of the Revenue Commissioners, as far as I know, nothing has happened, and in all the cases there has been very considerable delay. I will give one or two examples; I do not want to weary the House or the Minister by attempting to go through the file which I have here, but these are a few typical examples. There was the case of a woman whose salary was £135. Her husband is a small landholder, the valuation of his holding being £5. Without any notice of any kind she had £6 stopped from her October salary. The salary was about £11 a month.
There was another case where a woman had the same salary. The valuation of the farm in this case was £4, and they had three children. There was £4 stopped from her October salary. A man with a wife and four children has £278; £10 9s. has been deducted from his salary for a month. A woman with £175, whose husband is an unemployed agricultural labourer, had £9 13s. 5d. stopped from her salary. I have several instances here where the teacher has paid locally and the money has been stopped again at the head office. One of our branch secretaries, writing to me, says: "I met four teachers to-day who paid their Income tax for the last year and who had the same tax again deducted from their October salaries. There is bungling somewhere." There is the case of a teacher who is married and has six young children; her husband has been unemployed for over twelve months; she neglected filling up her Income tax forms from 1919 to 1922, but since then she has filled up all forms, claiming deductions for her husband and children, with the result that their income was not taxable at all. She was notified that the amount due on account of income was £76 5s. 1d., and that £19 a month was to be deducted from her from October until that amount was paid, leaving her £2 a month to keep her husband and six children for the next four months.
There is another case for the month of July, a case where a sum of £30 was deducted for two months from a woman's salary. Her salary was £23 per month, that is, £15 was stopped out of the £23 each month, and she has had an intimation to the effect that a similar amount would be deducted each month up to the end of the present year, the total amount to be deducted being £90 15s. 9d. This woman has two children under 16, and she has other children over that age who are being educated. Her husband has £40, and yet there is stopped £90 15s. 9d. There is another case of a teacher who was notified in February, 1923, that the total tax due for 1920-21, 1921-22, and 1922-23 was £6 7s., but a few mornings ago, on the 17th November, she received a letter giving her new assessments altogether for this period, which amount to £47 10s. For instance, the income tax collector had notified her that for 1920-21 her assessment would be nil. Now he notifies her that her assessment was £30 18s. He does not say how that was arrived at, although the original assessments were arrived at after explanations received from the teacher herself. That is an example of what is happening when tax is deducted, and this is a case of what is happening when the teacher makes an effort to get back the tax which is wrongfully deducted. There is a case of a teacher who was wrongfully assessed in July with £21 4s. 5d.; there should not have been any assessment at all. She went to the collector and he promised that the thing would be made right. There was £11 deducted from her July salary; she found out that she was not liable; the inspector promised to write to the head office about it, and she herself wrote to the head office. She got a letter on the 6th September telling her that a refund of the £11 deducted from the July salary would be made to her as soon as the relative tax would be received from the Education Office, but when her August salary was paid, somewhere about the 11th September, a further £11 was deducted. She has made various efforts since to get back that money, which should never have been stopped from her, and she has not got it yet. Letters received from the Education Department say that the deductions were made as they were ordered by the Inland Revenue Commissioners.
I want to say there is very grave complaint, considerable complaint, all over the country from teachers with regard to the manner in which these things are being done. I think it is not too much to expect that a special effort should be made to have these things regularly done and without causing such hardship and cause of complaint to the teachers. The teachers do not wish to evade in any way any tax they are properly and regularly liable for. They were, as I say, in 1920, 1921, and 1922, no doubt like everybody else, but now that the arrears are being collected they wish to get the same consideration that has been promised to other taxpayers. I hope the Minister will look into this matter and see that these cases and such things as these, do not happen. As I say, the complaint is general from all over the country, but I must say there is one particular district, that is the Sligo district, from which the greatest numbers of complaints seem to come.
