Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

With due respect, the witness is spending a very valuable afternoon of his time here. I know the Revenue Commissioners are pressed for time. I am just detailing what would be helpful and perhaps we could have it two or three days beforehand. We are not resourced on this committee and it is brand new. The amount of information we can get is less than what has been my experience in other committees. As the committee is in a start-up stage, I am trying to be helpful.

Mr. Howard spoke about the effective rate being close to 10%, if I understood him correctly. I appreciate this is probably all available.

The data on page 7 of 8 are about the contributions to employment and employment taxes. While I have stated to Mr. Howard previously that these data are important and useful, could we have that in comparative tabular form? Corporation tax is a critical area, and I will comment on that, but the employment content, the investment content and the PAYE, universal social charge, USC, and PRSI contributions, which are €11 billion, are very significant and some comparatives would give us a sense of volume growth or decrease. However, that is very helpful in understanding the figures.

When Mr. Howard was before the committee previously, we had a discussion about losses being carried forward. In various elements of the report there are indications of very significant losses being carried forward. If I read the report correctly, approximately €2.16 billion of corporation tax was forgone in the year in question as a consequence of the utilisation of losses carried froward. Mr. Howard told me last year, and I do see an update, that in terms of the value of the losses as opposed to the gross losses, there were accumulated losses of €15 billion, over €9 billion of which was in the financial services sector and approximately €400 million in the construction industry. I do not have the same comparative figures for today but I would like to see them.

To deal with the €9 billion in the financial services area, which I believe is under the heading Financial and Insurance Activities - the pink area on the chart on page 3 of 8, I find it odd that the actual contribution in terms of the financial services sector is relatively small. These are just the trading profits. I would like to see comparative figures. I do not know whether the manufacturing is down to construction and so on taking such a great leap forward. I find it hard to read that particular chart.

To revert to Mr. McCarthy's earlier comment, we now have a huge number of banking companies coming into enormous profitability. From those statistics, the two so-called pillar banks, which I believe are each earning profits of over €1 billion a year, have carried forward many losses, therefore, they can choose when they will make any contribution to corporation tax. In terms of Mr. McCarthy's comments about stability, would it not make much more sense to do a copy of the minimum effective income tax in respect of higher income earners regarding corporations whose profits go above, say, €100 million? Once they go above that, they would have to pay a minimum effective tax rate, notwithstanding the fact that in Irish law and the law of most other countries it is possible and understandable that people can carry losses forward for various reasons such as to start out again.

Mr. McCarthy spoke about stability and the debt ratio, that is another way of approaching stability. I argued for the introduction of the minimum effective income tax rate for higher earners, and that has been quite successful. It is one of the reasons that for higher earners other than higher earners who are non-resident for tax purposes in Ireland, their contribution is no longer 0%, 1% or 3% and has started to normalise. Has any modelling been done on implementing such a minimum rate? I understand the reason stability, correctly, is an objective.

Given that the banks are moving into significant profitability, a huge amount of tax will be forgone and postponed over a long period.