If you’re non-Irish resident, and selling a property here, there is a special rule relating to Capital Gains Tax that you will need to watch very carefully.
In short, your solicitor is prohibited from distributing the net sale proceeds to you until they first obtain a Letter of No Audit from Revenue.
The purpose of the Letter of No Audit is to confirm that Revenue are happy with your Capital Gains Tax (CGT) Return and Computation as submitted to them, and that they do not intend to carry out an audit of your Return.
So instead of filing a Return and paying the CGT liability to Revenue perhaps many months after your sale closes, as would be quite sufficient if you were resident here, this rule places an urgent imperative on you to have your Return prepared and filed with Revenue, along with supporting computations and documents, as soon as possible after the sale closes.
It also means that a Revenue official is almost certainly going to personally review your Return, so you will need to provide them with sufficiently strong supporting computations and documents to ensure that there shouldn’t be any hiccups in their issuing the Letter.
If they aren’t fully satisfied with your CGT Return and therefore delay issuing the Letter of No Audit until all their queries are resolved, you could find yourself – at least in theory – out of pocket and waiting a long time to receive the sale proceeds from your solicitor.
Happily, in our experience the process is straightforward if all the correct steps are followed, and we have an excellent track record in obtaining Letters of No Audit for non-resident customers.
If you require one, contact us today.
Thomas McGibney & Company 