Brian Hayes (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The way in which we have been approaching this subject - we have had regard to comments that have been made by colleagues at the committee throughout the year and during the annual Finance Bill process - is to look at an assessment, subhead by subhead, of the effectiveness of tax. When the Minister produced his statement this year, a number of reports were issued that day on the effectiveness of tax schemes that we have introduced. We have done that on the basis of proposals that have been made. That is a fair way of doing it.

The problem is that companies are not tax individuals. Tax individuals, in the majority of cases, exist in one country. Multinational businesses exist in multiple countries and, as I stated in my opening statement, essentially a blended rate applies.

Deputy Doherty's amendment, in the context of multinational companies, states the Minister shall "analyse the impact of this Finance Act". In any given year, a corporation's ability to pay tax is not based only on the Finance Bill. A multiplicity of issues, not only one Finance Bill, affect a corporation's rate of tax. That must be borne in mind.

The difficulty of producing a model for a company is, of course, the same difficulty that applies to all of the reports published to date by the OECD, the European Commission, PwC, this committee and others - it is based on the assumptions one makes. The assumptions one makes differ, case by case, based on how much is forgone through research and development, capital allowances, etc. That is the difficulty that arises in this regard.

The question I would pose to Deputy Pearse Doherty is with what bit of the data in this area that Revenue has produced on an annual basis is there a difficulty. Without being specific to companies, groups of companies or a model company, it gives the raw data across the tax head, which, incidentally, we all want to see go up. It is in the country's interest that we get more on the corporate tax side after the collapse that occurred in 2007-08.