Finance Minister Tonio Fenech anticipated flak and he duly received it. He came up with a scheme to give partial amnesty from payment of accumulated interest and penalties to tax defaulters.
Announcing the move, he conceded that taxpayers who had always been regular in their payments to the department would say the scheme was unfair.
He frankly admitted he was trying to raise revenue to make up for an expected shortfall against his estimate of €20 from income tax receipts, and €40 million more from other sources. He will do so by focusing on around €600 million said to be owing to the Inland Revenue Department and accumulated over the years.
Continuing to use frankness in an effort to disarm critics, he said taxpayers who had always been regular in their payments to the department would say the scheme was unfair. But the State had the duty to find a balance between taking the long legal road of chasing defaulters, with the risk that money owed would still not be collected, or giving this amnesty and hoping to recoup the money.
Sharp criticism duly poured out, as expected, from the Opposition, and also from individuals who felt aggrieved that the dishonest seemed to be stealing another march on them.
I have championed fiscal morality since I was Labour shadow spokesman on finance in the 1990s, and tried to do something about it when I returned briefly to the finance ministry in 1996.
Within months after I left, my gesture (to appoint a Commission for Fiscal Morality) was left to die without any funeral note being played to send it off.
That did not cause fresh evasion. But surely, it did not help to eradicate it by a few old cents, either. Nor, one should add, did the Inland Revenue Department stop its efforts to chase evaders.
It has turned the screw in various ways, but not quite enough. Evasion is still rampant. The Finance Minister would have made a better case for his move had he come out with fresh measures to attack tax evasion more ferociously, even as he also came up with the partial-amnesty ploy.
That he did not do so does not mean that he is wrong to be inventive in how to try to persuade income tax defaulters to come clean. It should be said that the €600 million amount referred to does not represent the total of accrued interest and penalties due to undeclared or under declared income.
Nor is the department right in every case, as further lengthy administrative and legal proceedings would probably show.
Yet there is a good net cache which remains unpaid.
Shouting that those who owe it should not be forgiven due interest and penalties will not move the issue one inch forward.
The balance would remain what it is. Place that in the context of the government suffering lower revenue than it (short-sightedly) anticipated. What you get is the possibility of fresh taxation.
The budgetary deficit cannot be allowed to widen to dangerous proportions once more, even if both Mr Fenech and Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi have been less than wise in the way they trumpeted assurances that they had it in hand. The effort, wrong political stances aside, is worth making. It is, however, incomplete. It is bad enough treating equals - income earners - unequally, giving the latter amnesty from paying in full for their sins.
The government is also discriminating among those who, for some reason or another, have not kept up with their payments, including for VAT and/or social security.
The Auditor General reports annually on estimated income tax, plus penalties and interest, which is an uncollected balance carried forward. I don't believe he does so in respect of VAT and social security dues.
The Finance Minister, announcing the income tax amnesty, specifically ruled out a similar measure regarding VAT. He did not say anything about social security arrears and related dues.
To my mind, he should have done so. Once the government adopted the logic of trying to collect income tax payments which, though due, for all intents and purposes remain out of reach, with is illogical not to do the same in regard to other revenue heads.
Had it done so, the criticism would have been louder. The Opposition would have been harsher in its condemnation, true to the style of every party in opposition. More righteous individuals would have stepped forward to proclaim their disgust.
That is why the measure requires parallel thinking on how to try fresh evasion moving forward, be it of income tax, VAT or social security.
The absence of that parallelism shows that the government is not thinking things out fully. That reflects the pressure the administration is labouring under as the lagged effects of the recession work through more viciously.
It should step back and think more deeply. It needs to do so also in the context of the celebrated VAT fraud case now before the law courts. Many people have been, to put it mildly, puzzled by the punishment handed out so far, in comparison to the potential and to the treatment meted out in other court cases.
The government and the courts are, of course, separate, but that will not prevent more flak from reaching the Prime Minister and his team.