Mr. Sorley McCaughey:

The world of taxation is very different from that which existed ten years ago and there have never been more people interested in it. Tax people are having their day in the sun and are public people in a way they have never been before. However, the world of public policy making in the area of tax is limited to a very small number of people and that does not reflect the growing understanding and awareness of the function of taxation in the world today. I would, perhaps provocatively, characterise it in Ireland as a way of avoiding tax and that undermines some of the fundamental principles of an effective taxation system, one of which is to generate the revenue to ensure human rights for people across the world. There are redistributive and repricing elements to it as well and these are important.

There are not enough multidisciplines involved in public policy-making around taxation and we need a far greater input from those in the world of international law and human rights who are well versed in the area of robotics, from university lecturers and from professionals so that we expand it beyond the current very limited pool of people. With a limited pool and a narrow objective, one will get narrow outcomes and one will not get the comprehensive outcome that tax requires.

One of the things Christian Aid and others have been advocating is the creation of a multi-stakeholder body to incorporate multidisciplines and to have a role in advising the Minister for Finance on elements of corporation tax that may have been missed by the people who have traditionally been involved in the area. We all know examples of egregious forms of tax avoidance which had existed for many years but which were only acted on in the past few years. However, I do not believe they would have happened had a broader pool of people been involved in advising the Minister. It has often been NGOs which have raised these issues with the Minister for Finance and they have often been acted on under duress but if there was a more collegial and constructive engagement with the Department, the Minister and a broad-based multi-stakeholder body, we would have a much more effective outcome.

On data, Mr. Lewis will speak to the challenges he came up against when writing the report in November. While some of the data challenges were probably understandable, he will also have something to say on areas where the data could have been made more freely available. The issue of public country-by-country reporting of company reports is current in the context of access to data, but it is opposed by the Government. If we have learned anything from the past ten years it is the importance of the role of the media and civil society in highlighting instances where there might be dubious cases of profit shifting between companies to avoid tax. The Government has an opportunity to lead and to be proactive in support of this policy. This would also have the benefit of ensuring there is no misunderstanding of the limited amount of information that is made available by companies, especially where that information is incomplete. Were public country-by-country reports made available in their entirety, people would have a more informed and better understanding of the activities of companies and this would eliminate the misunderstandings we sometimes see.