Mr. Mike Lewis:

I will say a quick word about data and then deal with the Deputy's points about automation, which brings us back to the EU proposals we are talking about today. We did a lot of work last year on data produced by the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Finance and other parts of Government. A lot of data relating to Ireland's economic linkages with developing countries are not publicly available because of confidentiality provisions in the statistics Act or taxpayer confidentiality in cases where there are a small number of individual or corporate taxpayers in a particular data point. This is particularly true in the case of linkages to smaller economies and there are good reasons for confidentiality provisions. It would be interesting, however, to explore whether the Revenue Commissioners and the Department could draw upon the data in a non-public way in order to do things like tax spillover analyses or if they could make the data available in a more granular form, on an country-by-country basis, which would not impinge on taxpayer confidentiality.

Automation and robotics is a huge topic of discussion in the international development arena and there are anxieties that countries which are already low on global value chains will fall further down the chains if large numbers of jobs are automated, such as those of flower pickers in Kenya, for example. The erosion of jobs and labour tax revenue from them is an area of economic transformation that will not be dealt with by the EU proposals. This is why it is important to get corporate tax right, particularly the factors for allocating profit. As automation and robotics trends continue, these represent further opportunities to attribute taxable profits to highly mobile intangibles. They will exacerbate some of the problems with mobile intellectual property and the location of highly mobile profit centres within low-tax jurisdictions, which we already see in other parts of the digitised economy. It is yet another cautionary warning that we need to get corporate profit tax right.