Life can be taxing in every sense – take an average evening when you go home to your negative equity house, turn on the telly, make a cup of tea and put the tea bag in the bin. Next year, to achieve all of that, you’ll have had to pay a household levy, a licence fee/broadcast charge, a water levy and bin charges.

Let’s say you’re enjoying a biscuit with your tea – that’s a VAT charge – and you’ve turned on the central heating; think of the excise duty on your oil.

If the kids are in College, you know all about the registration fee. If you’re in work, there’s an employment levy and if you’re on a pension, the taxman is coming after you to ensure you’re not living in the lap of luxury at the state’s expense.

But if you’re in NAMA, you might be okay despite the great debt you incurred from your greed.

Because only now is the National Asset Management Agency getting around to demanding tax returns from some developers in an effort to ensure they are disclosing the full extent of their assets to the agency.
NAMA has threatened enforcement proceedings where developers are being uncooperative and the agency believes they are hiding the full extent of their properties and other assets.

Rather than coming so late in the game, it would seem like this would have been a good place to start – and if our developer friends haven’t been entirely honest, perhaps confiscation of the hidden assets might qualify as a good counter-punch.

None of this nonsense about the mansion belonging to the wife or the children – if it was paid for in the same way as the other homes and hotels, it’s still part of the same pot.

In theory this shouldn’t have come to this because when developers submit business plans to NAMA, they are obliged to inform the agency of their assets and are frequently asked to provide tax returns.
And by matching the tax paid on rental income to the list of properties, the agency can see if the developers have been honest and declared all their assets to NAMA.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.