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

I move amendment No 4:

In page 15, between lines 3 and 4, to insert the following:“Review and scrutiny

19. (1) The Minister shall, as part of the annual Budget process, produce a report on the operation of the KDB including a consideration of the intersection of the KDB with other tax expenditure measures and its impact on the delivery of an effective tax rate for corporations.

(2) The Minister shall ensure appropriate annual information exchange between the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and the Office of the Revenue Commissioners in order to facilitate the publication of information on the cost of this initiative, including the cost to date for the Exchequer in revenues forgone, as part of the annual budgetary process.”.

Members can see that the amendments in this group are all covering the same ground and it is an extension of the logic of the earlier group of amendments. These amendments are to ensure that at the intersection of this certificate with Revenue matters and with other State supports that may benefit the companies that are also benefitting from the knowledge development box tax break, there will be the maximum oversight at the level of the Dáil and the relevant Oireachtas committees. This is to have the maximum information, reports and scrutiny at Dáil and committee level on all of these things for the reasons I have already set out.

I refer here to the anxiety that these tax breaks are not actually, or may not be, beneficial, that they do not represent good value for money, or that they may be abused or exploited by or be beneficial to particular small groups of companies, rather than being of general benefit to most companies or the public at large. For all of those reasons, these are sensible proposals to ensure that, at the very least, we have the level of oversight, scrutiny and information necessary to make an ongoing assessment of the benefit and value of this measure.