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

I refer to the issue of effective tax rates and Mr. O'Brien's claim that they are higher than some are claiming. We can see some of the figures, and they were alluded to by Mr. O'Brien in his introduction. I got this table about a year and a half ago and tried to draw some points out of it publicly because I was quite shocked by what I consider to be the effective rate, which is the amount of tax paid by companies, particularly the very profitable multinational companies. As the figures are broken down by the degree of profitability and size of those companies, we see that of the €73 billion in total profits, €52 billion of those profits are made by 480 companies that earn profits in excess of €10 million a year but only pay €3.3 billion in tax, which is probably about 7%. In terms of the EUROSTAT figures, which I have also alluded to in terms of effective rates, and I got this information from the Oireachtas library and research service, it states that the effective rate in Ireland is 6.8%, 18.9% for Denmark, 18% for Finland, 23.6% for Norway and 27.2% for Sweden, for example. What I do not understand is if the way we get from €70 billion to €4 billion is normal accountancy practice, why is our implicit rate so much lower than all of those other countries which presumably use the same accountancy practices as we do here?