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

The problem is that in trying to scrutinise the budget, which is our job, we are flying blind on a number of key questions and under this key heading.

We just have to take Mr. Howard's word on certain things without up-to-date information. There is speculation about what may be happening under this critical tax heading. That is unsatisfactory and means that we cannot do our job properly. That is the bottom line. I am still not quite sure if it means that we are calculating. We have not had an answer on the double Irish. Is it still operating? Are companies still availing of it and will they be able to avail of it for the next few years? If we were to calculate the tax liabilities of the offending companies, as the European Union would have wished us to do in the light of its ruling, notwithstanding the dispute about what happened in the past, what would it mean for now, this year and next year? That question has not been answered.

There is one other thing I will flag because I do not have time to deal with it. There is an ongoing vociferous campaign by building workers who believe the RCT system is being abused on a rampant scale by building contractors. I have put various questions to the Minister on the numbers in the construction industry on RCTs which are usually subsequently answered by Revenue. In one answer I was advised that 35,000 people were on RCTs, but I was then told in another that there were 70,000 people on them, which is quite a big difference. As only 130,000 people work in the construction sector, it means, according to one of the figures, that two thirds of them are self-employed. I do not believe that for one minute. We then discover that virtually nothing is coming back under that tax heading. In some years there is a minus figure, but overall there is almost nothing, which suggests there is absolute rampant abuse of the bogus self-employment RCT system. I do not believe we are taking seriously the allegations that are being made consistently. The dogs on the street in the construction industry know that this is going on and still we do not seem to be doing anything about it.

I will flag one further issue. The Unite trade union, in particular, and some of the other unions have highlighted the very low levels of employers' PRSI as one of the big deficits in the tax system in terms of having a sustainable tax base. We have much lower levels of employers' PRSI than in most of the rest of Europe. This is at the heart at the tax battle or conflict about where we will get the money to have a sustainable tax base.