Employment Tax 

Ireland | Employment tax audits and interventions—where to next?

Summary

The Irish Revenue Commissioners recently published their headline results for 2025 ahead of the release of the full annual report for the year. The figures give some important insights on the levels of voluntary compliance being achieved through its broad activities, as well as the impact of interventions under the Compliance Intervention Framework (CIF).

Of particular note is that Revenue carried out over 290,000 tax audits and other interventions (compliance checks and risk reviews), yielding €734 million to the exchequer. While this covers all tax heads, a significant proportion of the total interventions relate to Employment Taxes, which is unsurprising given that there were over 4 million employments registered with Revenue across some 273,000 employers for 2025.

The detail

Recent trends in compliance enforcement

The high levels of compliance achieved through Revenue’s activities, however, do not mean there has been any lessening of Revenue’s compliance focus or the yield generated. On the contrary, these high levels of compliance have allowed Revenue to prioritise resources to key risk areas. Examples of such programmes, both current and recent, include:

• The National Share Scheme Project
• Enhanced Reporting Requirement (ERR) to report certain expenses, allowances and benefits
• Audits of PAYE Settlement Agreements (PSAs) on small and irregular benefits
• Employment Status (in light of the framework arising out of the Domino’s Pizza case)
• Employment Wage Subsidy (EWSS) Scheme to recover overpayments of the subsidy post the COVID 19 pandemic
• Industry / Sectoral focused projects

These programmes have supplemented the audits and other interventions made possible by the introduction in 2019 of the PAYE Modernisation regime (aka Real Time Reporting). Revenue now has unprecedented levels of digital reports and information which, combined with significant use of Data Analytics, has enabled them to identify risk and detect payroll and benefit tax compliance failures in real time and to intervene promptly and efficiently.

This has been particularly the case for companies with high employee numbers, high payroll costs, complex benefits structures or substantial cross border employee movements (secondments or business travel). Revenue has made it clear that it sees this framework as the future of its approach to managing and encouraging compliance.

2026 and beyond

We have recently seen our clients experience a substantial uplift in Revenue intervention notifications, driven by one or more of the factors mentioned. Given the success of the current Revenue approach and the fact that it is the employer, rather than Revenue, who will take the burden of the work, this can be expected to continue.

Managing the risk

By pre-empting an intervention you can manage potential tax costs, particularly where a voluntary disclosure might be necessary, and mitigate any penalty and interest charges that might apply. It is best practice to carry out periodic (and early) reviews in key risk areas, along with reviewing day to day payroll processes for accuracy. Typical areas for review normally include:

• Employee expense payments
• Off payroll benefits such as staff entertainment or non-taxable awards
• Contractor agreements
• Processes relied upon to capture benefit data for processing through payroll and the treatment of benefits identified
• Payroll processes to ensure proper identification and calculation of gross, taxable and net pay
• Equity awards, particularly in light of recent changes to bring all equity income within the PAYE system
• Treatment of pay and benefit elements associated with cross border movement of employees
• Efficiency and accuracy of processes supporting non payroll reporting such as PSA and ERR reports

Our team at Vialto Partners has significant experience helping organisations through complex Compliance Interventions and Revenue Audits and can support you in navigating the process—from initial notification, through review and preparation, to the audit itself, and any necessary post audit remediation.

Contact us

For a deeper discussion on the above, please reach out to your Vialto Partners point of contact, or alternatively:

Aoife Reid
Partner

Clara Flynn
Director

Claire Cleary
Manager

Want to know when a Regional Alert is posted?

Simply follow our Vialto Alerts page on LinkedIn and posts will be displayed on your feed. To ensure you don’t miss one, once you’re on our LinkedIn page, click on the bell icon under the banner image to manage your notifications.

Further information on Vialto Partners can be found here: www.vialtopartners.com

Vialto Partners (“Vialto”) refers to wholly owned subsidiaries of CD&R Galaxy UK OpCo Limited as well as the other members of the Vialto Partners global network. The information contained in this document is for general guidance on matters of interest only. Vialto is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information. All information is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information, and without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to warranties of performance, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event will Vialto, its related entities, or the agents or employees thereof be liable to you or anyone else for any decision made or action taken in reliance on the information in this document or for any consequential, special or similar damages, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

© 2026 Vialto Partners. All rights reserved.