Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The way I see it is all fraud is wrong, be it tax fraud, company fraud or welfare fraud. Some people make a distinction between them based on perceptions around the social class of the offender but my view is that anyone who is committing fraud is stealing from the public and stealing from society so in whatever brief I hold, I intend to take a hard line on these issues. I did so at the Department of Social Protection, I would be doing so were I in the Department of Finance and I am doing it now in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. That is one of the reasons I am pushing this forward as a piece of legislation I want to get done so we can crack down on corporate fraud, as we should. That is why I am putting forward the legislation now and why we are providing more staff and money for the body.

I would envisage that continuing to scale up over the years because we need to crack down on all forms of fraud. I would never equivocate about the different types of fraud or seek to justify that one type of fraud is in some way different or another is somehow justifiable. I found that argument very hard to understand when it was made at the time when I was in the Department of Social Protection. The suggestion was that it was somehow justifiable because other people were committing fraud too and why did we not crack down on all forms of fraud. This Bill is a good step forward in that regard.

Where I do not agree with Senator Gavan is his suggestion that this is the only means by which the Government combats white-collar crime and economic crime of this nature. This is just one body and its entire remit is company law. The Revenue Commissioners have significant resources to deal with tax fraud. They have much greater resources than the Department of Social Protection. The budget of the Department of Social Protection is between €20 billion and €30 billion. Revenue takes in about €50 billion or €60 billion a year. Revenue is much better equipped than the Department of Social Protection. Even though Revenue is only dealing with double the amount of money, it probably has more than double the number of staff working as inspectors as the Department. There is the CCPC as well, which is responsible for competition law. Then there is the Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority, IAASA. One would have to take them all together to give a read of it.