Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

No. The 30 staff are for the contact tracing. Essentially, this time last year when the Estimate was published there was a significant provision in it to work on a new dividend withholding tax scheme because many dividends, especially in light of the financial services sector here, are paid to persons outside the State and we wanted to have a more modern method of accounting for the withholding tax on dividends being paid to them. As a result of Covid, work on that project did not proceed as planned. The staff and the resources allocated for that project this time last year were used on developing the employment wage subsidy scheme, the stay and spend, and putting together the warehousing programme for the PAYE and VAT payments at no cost to the Department. This was because some of those, especially the employment ones, are closely related to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. Some staff in Revenue doubled-up because one cannot work one without the other. It is not possible to say how many staff were allocated. They all remained working in the Department but it was a cross-Department project.