2 November 2023
By Tom Collins
tom@TheCork.ie
The Minister for Finance and the Minister for Health must immediately reverse the decision by the Revenue to treat monies received by General Practitioners under the GMS Scheme as individual income.
General Practitioners (GP’s) who are practicing in most cases are in a partnership arrangement. Monies received under the Medical Card Scheme (GMS) and from private patients are lodged in to the partnership bank account of the practice. The cost of running the partnership including lighting, heating, insurance, staff costs, are all paid from this partnership account. The Doctors themselves will take an annual salary and are taxed from the salary which they receive from the practice.
The Revenue now propose treating income under the GMS Scheme as individual income and GP’s will be taxed accordingly. This is not acceptable and will force GP’s to retire or withdraw from the GMS Scheme.
There is now an urgent need for both Ministers to resolve this issue. There is a need for the Department of Health and HSE to correspond with Revenue and advise that it is acceptable for a GP to treat the income under the GMS Scheme as partnership income.
There is also an urgent need for the Ministers to amend the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 which would give effect to the allocation of GMS income between partners within a partnership.
This issue needs to be resolved at the earliest possible date as many GP’s have already indicated that they intend to retire or resign from the GMS Scheme.
The Ministers need to issue an urgent statement to reassure GP’s that this issue will be resolved and that individual GP’s will not be taxed unfairly.