The author, whose real name is Darren O\u2019Shaughnessy, has written a string of hit books for young adults\n<\/p>\n
Best-selling Irish young adult author Darren O\u2019Shaughnessy has made a near \u20ac2.2m tax settlement with the Revenue Commissioners for not paying enough income tax.<\/p>\n
Mr O\u2019Shaughnessy (53), who writes under the pen name Darren Shan, is the author of a string of hugely successful novels including The Demonata, Zom-B and the Saga of Darren Shan series.<\/p>\n
He lives in Limerick and has been a novelist for nearly 30 years.<\/p>\n
But the Revenue Commissioners also found his tax details to be a page turner.<\/p>\n
It found that he owed \u20ac1.44m for the under-declaration of income tax. It added \u20ac271,000 in interest and a further \u20ac432,000 in penalties to the bill he owed the taxman. It brought the novelist\u2019s settlement with Revenue to more than \u20ac2.14m.<\/p>\n
The amount has been paid in full, according to the latest list of tax defaulters.<\/p>\n
His agent has been contacted for comment.<\/p>\n
The Revenue Commissioners lists Mr O\u2019Shaughnessy\u2019s occupation as a company director, landlord and novelist.<\/p>\n
He is a director of two companies in Ireland \u2013 Stackallen Investments and Home of the Damned.<\/p>\n
The latest set of publicly available accounts for Stackallen Investments show that at the end of March last year, it had nearly \u20ac1.3m worth of investment properties on its books. They are understood to include a commercial business unit bought by the company in 2019.<\/p>\n
Home of the Damned notes in its accounts that it is engaged in the \u201cpublication, creation, production, editing, translation, marketing and design of books and other such written works of fiction for mass market appeal and the exploitation of all intellectual property rights including copyright and trademarks associated with such books and works and related activities\u201d.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, London-born Mr O\u2019Shaughnessy noted that this year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of his Cirque Du Freak novel, the first in the Saga of Darren Shan series. It\u2019s among his novels that he is hoping will be made into a TV show.<\/p>\n
Last year, Revenue completed almost 311,000 audit and compliance interventions which yielded \u20ac591m, and settled 256 tax avoidance cases yielding \u20ac46m. It also secured 20 criminal convictions for serious tax evasion and fraud and published 74 tax settlements in the List of Tax Defaulters.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe leverage our vast data holdings and make full use of the statutory powers and exchange of information provisions at our disposal to proactively identify and challenge schemes and transactions that create an unfair tax advantage for those involved, and display indicators of tax avoidance or tax evasion,\u201d noted Revenue Commissioner Ruth Kennedy earlier this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The author, whose real name is Darren O\u2019Shaughnessy, has written a string of hit books for young adults…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[18,19,17,24512,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-53080","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-john-mulligan","12":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}