Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I ask Mr. Cody to so do, although he has explained it fairly well.

On page 35 there is reference to third-party information and data analytics. Mr. Cody mentioned this in passing. The report states:

...in 2018, matched third-party data was used to drive a wide range of ongoing projects including work on medical locums, providers of short-term accommodation, and Irish residents in receipt of income from foreign assets. In addition, we began a review of unmatched data to identify possible evidence of shadow economy activity.

Mr. Cody referred to medical locums. Providers of short-term accommodation include AirBnB hosts.

The next paragraph states that the data gathered in third-party returns is used to "support voluntary compliance, for example, information on agricultural subsidy payments provided by the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine was used to prepopulate 78,000 income-tax returns."

That is interesting. Anyone using ROS knows now is the time one gets the pre-populated tax return. Mr. Cody is telling me Revenue has information from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and not just from the employers to pre-populate part of the form. It would be great if Revenue could get that information from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection in due course. I know I am probably disturbing a hornet's nest here but we have all encountered several cases in the past of, for example, somebody in receipt of a social welfare payment who might have taken up employment again or who might have been overpaid in social welfare. It takes a minimum of two years before the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection tells Revenue and then the person either gets a tax bill because he or she had not declared a social welfare payment or as the case may be, the person might owe money to the Department because he or she got a job. One would have hoped the lines of communication between Revenue and the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection would be closely aligned because it is the biggest Department in the country for payments, such that if somebody on a social welfare payment takes up employment it is immediately matched. It takes years for that to happen in some cases and vice versa, if somebody in employment gets a social welfare payment for some other reason, it is taxable. Sometimes it takes two years for that to happen and then people are upset that they are getting this bill afterwards. They wonder why somebody did not tell them at the time. We know people should know themselves but it causes a lot of upset. That is down to what I would call the delay in transferring information between Revenue and the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. It causes a lot of hardship for a lot of people. I would have said the exact same thing to the Accounting Officer from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection here a few weeks ago.