Investors fail to collect €337m in tax refunds
June 3 2006, 10:44 amIrish investors have failed to collect €337 million they are owed in tax refunds from overseas share and bond transactions, a leading tax reclamation expert has said.
Stephen Everard, managing director of tax specialist Goal, said the amount of withholding tax from overseas tax authorities owed to Irish investors has more than doubled in the past three years because of the huge expansion of trade being executed out of Dublin.
‘‘A lot of major companies, such as Microsoft, have only recently started to pay dividends and these are not being reclaimed,’’ Everard said.
Investors are able to claim refunds if a double taxation treaty is in place between Ireland and the foreign tax authority.
Everard said that it has found that small and medium sized custodians, some fund managers and ‘‘a lot of’’ hedge funds had failed to reclaim the tax withheld on their clients’ behalf overseas.
He said that many hedge funds did not realise they were not obliged to disclose the identity of the underlying investor when reclaiming tax on dividends from overseas tax authorities.
Goal said there was no threshold preventing individual investors from reclaiming tax. It has estimated that Ireland is placed sixth in the global league of countries failing to reclaim tax on foreign securities.
The US is the largest loser, with €1.4 billion owed, followed by Britain with €963 million in unclaimed tax.
