Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 3:

In page 8, between lines 16 and 17, to insert the following:“3. The Minister shall within 6 months of the passing of this Act, prepare and lay before Dáil Éireann an analysis of individual tax payers in the State, in light of the current reporting deficit whereby the breakdown of the number of taxpayers and their associated income are provided in the form of tax payer units which includes a mix of joint earners as well as individual earners.”.

This was touched on earlier. I am not sure if the Minister has seen the budgetary committee's report on the budget. This is one of the proposals the committee agreed to include in that report. It is something I argued for and am thankful it was included. In the present scenario, we do not have a clear breakdown of individual incomes in terms of taxpayers. We are dealing with taxpayer units. That is the point I made earlier today about those earning €70,000. Are they in the top 15%? Yes and no. Some of them are combined incomes. There is no way of knowing how many people in the State are paying tax on a single income of €70,000 because we use taxpayer units. For USC, we use a different method because it is individualised. We are a good bit of the way there with USC, yet we are using taxpayer units in terms of income tax.

The other issue was referred to earlier by Deputy Michael McGrath when he alluded to the fact that there are 2.6 million taxpayer units in the State. In terms of employees and self-employed people, the number is a lot less than that. That is because some of those incomes are pensions and so on. They are taxable and are therefore counted by Revenue.

We need far more granular detail in how we collect data. I have huge regard for the Revenue Commissioners. I think their systems are very good. The Revenue online service, ROS, is among the best that is out there. It is very easily usable and so on. The Revenue Commissioners collect a great amount of data. Like other members of the committee, I submit a lot of parliamentary questions and we get great, valuable data from Revenue. However, still in 2017 we do not have very simple data on individual incomes.

This throws up problems in terms of policy development. I will talk about a proposal that is in the Government's own papers, about tapering out tax credits. This is something we examined and for which we have argued for some time. We cannot progress it because it cannot be costed. It cannot be costed because we are dealing with taxpayer units. For this reason, it is decided to taper tax credits out at a starting point of €80,000. We do not know if we are hitting a couple with two incomes of €40,000 or an individual on €80,000. Obviously, if the Government is doing the tapering out of tax credits - a possibility it is proposing - it needs that type of data.

The proposed amendment provides that within six months of the enactment of this Bill, the Minister will prepare and lay before the Dáil an analysis of individual taxpayers in the State in light of the current reporting deficit. I think it is time that we moved on this and got the detail. I hope it is not a huge amount of work for the Revenue Commissioners. They do have all of this detail. They just do not have it in such a form that the model or programme they are using can spit out the information we are looking for in terms of individual income. We are talking about 2.6 million taxpayer units. In respect of each taxpayer unit, Revenue knows that Mr. A is on €30,000 and Mrs B is on €50,000 but it cannot give us that detail.