Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 3 December 2015

Public Accounts Committee

2014 Annual Report and Appropriation Accounts of the Comptroller and Auditor General
Vote 7 - Office of the Minister for Finance
Chapter 1 - Exchequer Financial Outturn for 2014
Chapter 2 - Government Debt
Chapter 3 - Cost of Bank Stabilisation Measures as at the end of 2014
Finance Accounts 2014

10:00 am

Mr. Derek Moran:

That was an unfortunate use of words on my part. Ultimately, just to reiterate, for a range of reasons this has significantly overperformed. We will do the econometric analysis as the data come through to try to understand where this came from and we may have far better answers in due course. It would have pushed the bounds of credibility in October 2014, in preparing for 2015, to have put in this type of forecast for corporation tax. There would not have been any basis for it. We tend to operate off the basis of national accounts estimation of profitability and for next year, I think on budget day we had approximately 8% growth. To a certain extent, this becomes de-risked, as the performance has been so strong this year that we are close to achieving the target for next year. Consequently, to achieve that and to keep the budget on target for next year, one does not need any growth and so that removes a bit of the risk. The interesting thing over the course of the year has been that we planned the budget for 2015 in October 2014, and that budget had a deficit target of 2.7%. By April, we were saying 2.4%, by October, 2.1% and it now looks as though it will be 1.7%. All of this essentially is feeding through into the deficit coming down more rapidly, which must be regarded as a positive. In itself, that removes some of the risk but the performance this year is up very close to the total target for next year. We know we have a large amount of work to do to try to understand this and we will be doing that.

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