Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Clearly, there are different levels of non-compliance. People can inadvertently fail to comply with any item of legislation but what we seek to do here is to provide a first-stop-shop to make sure that particularly new small businesses are aware of their obligations and opportunities. The reason we are bringing in, for example, the local authority, which is in charge of licensing in respect of their environmental or planning obligations, is that we are providing a one-stop-shop where businesses can get information about their compliance requirements but we are not moving on from that to create this as part of a more penal measure.

One of the kickbacks from the idea of the involvement of the local authorities was that many businesses were saying this will mean they will use their obligation to collect rates, in effect, with regard to the enterprise support. We need to keep responsibilities under different codes separate as well as enforcement. We do not want to create an environment where the attitude would be that businesses should not engage with certain bodies because all they are after is to see if one had paid one's rates on time or whatever it would be. This is not the function here, rather it is to support enterprise in the local area. That is what we want to do. While compliance is fine, to start implying that no grant will be applied and having a penal dimension to this would not be in the spirit of what we are trying to achieve here. We are trying to promote new start-ups.