Income tax payments (FOI)

Request

Can you break down the number/comment of '30% of the Island does not pay Income Tax' please? By that I mean 'who are the 30%', companies, person(s), couples and such like.

Response

The Minister for Treasury and Resources has on occasion commented that it is estimated that 30% of Islanders do not pay tax: most recently in his Budget 2017 speech to the States Assembly. This speech can be viewed on this website.

Budget speech 2017 

When quoting this percentage he is referring to individual people and not to couples, companies or other legal persons.

This figure can only be estimated at present. Some of the reasons for this are:

• Taxes Office data recognises a married couple/civil partnership as one taxpayer.
• Taxes Office data will include people that pay tax but are resident for just part of the tax year.
• there is a significant proportion of the resident population that are not on the Taxes Office system. These may be:
• young adults (aged 16 plus) still in full time education that have not yet sought work in the island and therefore have not been required to register for ITIS.
• resident Islanders that are exempt from tax, and are not likely to be liable to tax in the future (for example pensioners on low fixed incomes), who do not have a live tax record and are not sent annual tax returns.

The above bullets also illustrate why Taxes Office data cannot easily be matched to population figures gathered by the Statistics Unit in order to provide an accurate figure.

Work is being undertaken to produce a reconciliation between the population figure per the Statistics Unit and the number of taxpayers per the Taxes Office records. This reconciliation will be published during 2017.

Further statistical data can be found on the following links.

Answer to a written question on the States Assembly website

Response to a previous FOI request