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

It is 7.7% for domestic companies. This is another figure to add to the list. We have 2%, 6.2%, 6.8%, 8%, 10.9%, and the figure of 14% was bandied about at one stage, which was truly mystifying. Revenue's CTS1 statistics table on corporate tax tells its own story, and the suggestions that corporations pay anywhere close to 12.5% are exposed when one looks at the CTS1 table. Revenue helpfully breaks down the tax cases in the corporate sector into categories of profitability, starting with bands from €1 to €25,000 and €25,000 to €50,000 all the way up to companies making profits of between €5 million and €10 million and more than €10 million.

The figure for those with a profit of more than €10 million is interesting. Some time ago I asked whether we could have a further breakdown of the corporations with profits of more than €10 million, because in reality these are the multinationals. I was told we could not have this further breakdown because the Department of Finance stated it might allow people to identify individual companies and we could not possibly do this. This is pretty outrageous. What we have available to us gives us a clue as to the answers Deputy Doherty seeks. It shows 480 companies earn profits of more than €10 million per year, and these 480 companies earn €52 billion in pre-tax profits. The slightly lower figure for total income and gains before deductions and charges is €50 billion. A total of 480 companies have €50 billion of the profits and total corporate profits are €61 billion. The vast majority of profits generated by the corporate sector are generated by 480 companies, all of which earn profits in excess of €10 million. These 480 companies pay €3.3 billion in actual tax out of the €50 billion of total income and gains before deductions and charges. This gives an effective rate for them of approximately 7.5%. This figure includes companies at the lower end, which might not necessarily be multinationals, which earn €10 million or a little over €10 million in profits. Within the smaller number of multinationals in this group, which almost certainly make much bigger profits, it is certainly indicated from this effective rate that the big multinationals are those paying approximately 6% or even less in actual tax on their total gains. Down the table, the smaller companies making smaller profits are far more likely to be paying 9% 10% or 11%. Already the evidence available to us suggests domestic small and medium enterprises pay approximately 12.5% or, generally speaking, somewhere between 10% and 12%, but the big incredibly profitable multinationals pay 6% or 7%. This is just not acceptable.

This relates a little to the discussion we had on SARP, but here we are not dealing with a few hundred thousand euro but billions of euros in forgone taxes which could be going to the Exchequer. If these 480 companies, which make €50 billion and pay €3.3 billion in tax which works out at approximately 7%, were made pay 12.5% or even 10% or 11%, which is what most small and medium enterprises must pay, it would mean €2 billion or €3 billion extra in tax revenue for the Exchequer. This is what is being forgone because of the tax treatment of these multinationals. This must be investigated in a very serious way. I suspect this is happening because of the way in which these companies are able to write off a number of matters under certain headings, allowances and deductions which themselves need to be scrutinised. One of these is the royalties paid for patents, which brings us to the issue of the patents box and whether on its abolition the much trumpeted double Irish will, in fact, be replaced by another scheme through which the same companies will be able to avoid pretty much the same amount of taxes but in a slightly different way by speaking about patents and intellectual property rights. They will be given until 2020, which is six years, to reconfigure their tax avoidance systems and funnel all of this through royalties and intellectual property charges or however it is written down to avoid paying tax. This seems to be what is happening. I do not see why the Government shows no willingness to look into this or to look into what is a two-tier tax system with regard to small and medium domestic enterprises as against the tax treatment of multinationals. I am interested to hear what the Minister of State has to say about this.