When the government appointed him chairman in 2002, the Revenue Commissioners employed 6,000 people to collect 28bn a year in taxes.

Today, the same 6,000 taxmen are bringing in close to 40bn a year.

The trick has been to get other people to do the work for free. The PAYE system shifts most of the burden for collecting income taxes onto employers, who have to employ and pay for an army of payroll clerks just to ensure that the taxman is getting his cut.

The downside of effectively outsourcing much of the Revenue's work is that people, or "customers" in Revenue terminology, inevitably fall through the cracks. It sees its job as collecting tax, not guiding its reluctant customers through the complicated tax maze.

The result is that thousands of people end up paying too much into the government's coffers year after year because they do not understand their entitlements.

Tax practitioners tried to raise awareness of the issue by designating last week Tax Return Week. But don't hold your breath.

Opposition politicians have been highlighting the scandal of tax overpayments for years but nobody seems to be listening.

Daly's biggest value-formoney coup were the dreaded special investigations, which relied on fear and loathing rather than hard graft by the Revenue to squeeze more than 2.1bn out of 31,000 tax dodgers.

The bogus non-resident bank accounts were the hardest nut to crack but the game was up once Daly showed he had the guts to track down the account holders one-by-one after forcing the banks to hand over their names.

This flushed out tax dodgers from all over the place, who realised it was better to came out with their hands up rather than being named and shamed in the newspapers.

But outsourcing can only achieve so much and the time may have finally arrived for Daly to roll up his shirt sleeves and do more of the work himself.

Top of the agenda must be to ensure that more people are claiming the tax credits to which they are entitled.

When families fail to claim for medical expenses, shouldn't this raise a red flag in the Revenue, given that childhood illnesses inevitably require several trips to the doctor each year? When a couple are not getting mortgage interest relief, shouldn't somebody in the tax office pick up the phone enquire if they are entitled to rent relief?

These suggestions will probably be met with giggles by the Revenue. But in a democracy that cherished its citizens equally, this is exactly how the tax authorities would operate.

Daly's next priority must be to improve information gathering. His penny pinching ensured that there is no reliable data for the tax leakage caused by all of the tax shelters that still exist for everything from property investing, breeding houses or planting woodlands.

Even when the Revenue comes up with the figures, they are hopelessly out of date.

Browse through the Revenue's latest statistical summary and, while the date on the cover says 2004, most of the data comes from 2002.