Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister is aware, I have challenged the Government consistently on this issue in the past year or two and the very least it could do is accede to a request to provide the analysis and assessment Deputy Doherty has suggested in order that we can have the hard evidence before us and the public. That would allow them make their own judgments on this issue.

There is considerable slippage in terms of the gross profits made by companies, the idea of taxable profits and the actual profit made. I have not pulled this idea out of my head. I am putting my assertions on this issue to the Minister of State and other Ministers on the basis of information I got from the Department of Finance's CTS table 1 or 2 and from looking at EUROSTAT figures on corporation taxes paid in the various economies across Europe. It is clear that what is known in the EUROSTAT figures as the implicit rate, which is another term for effective rate, namely, the gross profits paid as against the actual amount of tax paid at the end, the latter as a percentage of the former, was 6.5%. That is according to those tables produced by EUROSTAT. The comparable figures for almost all other major European countries of implicit rates were much higher. The only exception to that was the Netherlands, which had an implicit rate similar to ours.

That assessment of implicit rates paid in Ireland in comparison with implicit rates paid elsewhere in Europe must be examined. The Minister of State has said we apply normal accounting standards, that taxable profits and gross profits are different and that it is all above board, but what he fails to explain is the reason for the gap between the implicit rate in Ireland, according to EUROSTAT's figures, and the implicit rate in Britain, Germany, France, Sweden and so on. With the one exception of the Netherlands, why is the gap so big? I put it to the Minister that at the very least this must be investigated because, to put it mildly, it is suspicious.

The CTS 1 and 2 tables on that the Minister provided me with show that the main beneficiaries of this enormous gap between gross profits and taxes paid are a few hundred companies at the highest end of the profit scale. What is interesting is that in the table the Minister produced for me in response to a question in which I asked him for the breakdown in deciles of the gross profits and the taxes paid, he provided that information until he got to the most profitable companies, which I believe numbered a few hundred. At that point he stopped giving me the information in deciles and stated that because there are so few companies involved at the top end, it would be breaching confidentiality to give me the information in deciles because I might be able to identify them. I do not accept that but we all know the identity of those companies. They are the big multinationals. I am certain the small and middle companies further down the table are paying 12.5% but it is the big companies that account for the majority of gross profits declared in this country that somehow manage through various measures to reduce their tax liability between gross profits and what they actually end up paying. That area must be seriously investigated because Ireland, along with the Dutch, the home of the Dutch sandwich and the double Irish, has this massive gap. That suggests something amiss with our corporation tax regime which is allowing these hugely profitable corporations to dodge their tax liability.