Why not break out taxes in percentage on payslips

OU812

This post, made me think,

Why don't we get a proper breakdown of where our taxes go as a percentage on our payslips (or at least as a taxation statement sent to us every year)? So do away with PAYE, PRSI, USC etc. & just have "Income Tax"

E.G.

Income Tax €100

Education: 1.23%
Welfare: 2.32%
Medical: 1.15%
Defence: 0.30%
Overseas Aid: 0.06%
Bears: 0.02%


Etc.


It'd give a far greater understanding & transparency to how money is spent.. (or is that the reason we don't get it)

CelticRambler

Here's why:



An actual (French) payslip where all the social charges are itemised out (no tax because French employees aren't taxed at source); that's half of a full A4 page of detail and it continues onto page 2 ....

So now you know that you've paid 13cts to APEC Cadres TB and your employer paid 19cts what are you going to do about it? Will you protest that your employer is contributing 3.459% of what you earned to Family Allowance because you don't have any children? Or that despite the many and various contributions to the communal pension pot, it's going to run dry in five years anyway?

Knowing all the detail won't change the fact that incompetent fools in the government will still squander what you've given them. :mad:

OU812

OK so, maybe an annual (or monthly) statement would be better. But I think we should see it...

scheister

I know Eoghan Murphy TD was writing a bill so that you would get an annual statement showing what the breakdown is. If you google his name and tax calculator brings you to a part of his site where its shows the breakdown. (originally put up in 2013 not sure if it has been updated since)

Legend100

I live and oz and they have started this approach this year for our balancing statement once the tax return is lodged. Interesting reading to see where the funds are allocated to

L1011

It has been suggested a few times that it should be done here, provided with your P60. It'd probably have been a good idea to get it out before the property tax and water charges started and ensure there was a "BORROWING YOU'LL FUND LATER: " section on it to show what wasn't being paid for at all (let alone this "I'm paying twice!" illogicality)

CelticRambler

That also highlights the limitations of trying to itemise anything effectively. These days, most governments have spent last penny of your taxes/social charges by lunchtime, January 2nd, and for the rest of the year you're just paying off the interest on what they've got to borrow to pay for the promises they couldn't wriggle out of, or the PPI contracts they should never have entered into, or their latest vote-buying scam.

It is possible to get a breakdown of how much has been spent during recent years (unless you're in France, where the EU auditors have never been able to get the sums to add up ... but then neither do the EU's own sums ... :pac: ) and in theory the budget statement tells you how much will be spent over the course of the current year. From that, you could make an attempt to calculate how much of that is coming out of your pay-packet.

But as I said above: once you know, what are you going to do about it? What can you do about it, other than give up working and/or fiddle your finances to avoid paying any taxes?

It might be a useful project for students doing an economics degree, but it'd be an awful waste of taxpayers' money to pay any civil servant to do it for real.

Carawaystick

OU812 wrote: »

So do away with PAYE, PRSI, USC etc. & just have "Income Tax"

Well for starters PRSI is social insurance, and you pay different rates depending on they way you get your income from, and as a result, you get different insurance payouts if you claim.