Irish lottery accused of tax advice

The national lottery has been accused of helping people to defraud the tax system.

Ireland.- Senator Kevin Humphreys asked the state tax revenue agency earlier this week to investigate the Irish National Lottery because he thinks that it could’ve helped people to avoid and defraud the country’s tax system.

Dermot Griffin, Ireland’s lottery chief, said: “We take them through what they need to think about. We would say, ‘Naturally there’s tax implications on your win. And it’s not just the win, it’s investments then, deposit interest, think about tax or whatever’. We wouldn’t say, you know, ‘This is what you should do’. We would say, ‘You should pick good taxation advisers or accountants or legal’. And, again, if they didn’t have help already, we would normally give them a list (of financial advisers), we would normally recommend that they go and talk to just not one, but to talk to a number of them, to see what ones they are comfortable with, and then take them on.”

Griffin said that their job is being able to point them in the right directions in terms of more specialist advice: “We don’t pay for their advisers. That’s naturally something they have to select themselves. Just to clarify, it’s a list of actions that we would normally give to winners, instead of a list of actual professional advisers,” he added.