M
mcbecker
Guest
We want to know if we have any chance of applying for unpaid child allowances going back many years.
My Dutch wife and I moved to Ireland with our three young children 19 years ago. I am a US citizen as such did not have permission to work here for the first seven years. US tax system provides relief or deductions for each child in a family so we never realised that a different system operated in Ireland which, as we now know, gives an allowance for every child separate from the tax system. We just never realised that everyone with children got the child allowance and of course never applied and now our children are grown. During our time here we had some hard times when money was very short but we scraped by and we never appled for any type of assistence and if we had had the child assistence it would have really helped. Now however we are faced with a law firm/collection agency on behalf of the Revenue pursuing my wife for some taxes she owes from several years ago and with penalties and interest it is over 10,000 euros. We don't want court proceedings and with my wife not working and debt problems related to comlications getting our house 3 years ago we have no way of getting out of this without refinancing our mortgage and we are both too old to get a reasonable mortage with most lenders.
The point I want to make is that all these years the government through social welfare was not paying us and without any form of "interest" added the amount of child welfare for 3 children would total well over 20,000 euros. While the two agencies are no connnected except that they are arms of the same government does my wife have any way of realistically getting what she was entitled to and using this unpaid amount one to clear the other??
The quick answer is probably "sorry, if you didn't get any child assistence in the past, too much time has passed and you are out of luck."
We feel it is unfair or even morally wrong to have to pay the back taxes which were only about £3,500 to start with while we never got the entitlements from the other agency. Also consider even if we could apply and receive the money it would not include any interest. Newcomers in recent years were and are given full info on entitlements and surely have made use of them. 19 years ago there was not the emphasis on ensuring information on entitlements was available.
So what do we do? just applying will probably result in a quick "NO". Is there any other recourse? Thanks for anything you can suggest.
My Dutch wife and I moved to Ireland with our three young children 19 years ago. I am a US citizen as such did not have permission to work here for the first seven years. US tax system provides relief or deductions for each child in a family so we never realised that a different system operated in Ireland which, as we now know, gives an allowance for every child separate from the tax system. We just never realised that everyone with children got the child allowance and of course never applied and now our children are grown. During our time here we had some hard times when money was very short but we scraped by and we never appled for any type of assistence and if we had had the child assistence it would have really helped. Now however we are faced with a law firm/collection agency on behalf of the Revenue pursuing my wife for some taxes she owes from several years ago and with penalties and interest it is over 10,000 euros. We don't want court proceedings and with my wife not working and debt problems related to comlications getting our house 3 years ago we have no way of getting out of this without refinancing our mortgage and we are both too old to get a reasonable mortage with most lenders.
The point I want to make is that all these years the government through social welfare was not paying us and without any form of "interest" added the amount of child welfare for 3 children would total well over 20,000 euros. While the two agencies are no connnected except that they are arms of the same government does my wife have any way of realistically getting what she was entitled to and using this unpaid amount one to clear the other??
The quick answer is probably "sorry, if you didn't get any child assistence in the past, too much time has passed and you are out of luck."
We feel it is unfair or even morally wrong to have to pay the back taxes which were only about £3,500 to start with while we never got the entitlements from the other agency. Also consider even if we could apply and receive the money it would not include any interest. Newcomers in recent years were and are given full info on entitlements and surely have made use of them. 19 years ago there was not the emphasis on ensuring information on entitlements was available.
So what do we do? just applying will probably result in a quick "NO". Is there any other recourse? Thanks for anything you can suggest.