Ms Isolde Goggin:

As I mentioned, I am pleased to say we have been working closely with our parent Department, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, on the enforcement mechanism and it has granted a substantial increase in our payroll book for 2021 to take account of this, so we will be working our way through that and recruiting. What form the new recruits or structure of the organisation take will depend on the final shape of the legislation.

Digital investigations is the other important area. It that goes right across the board for us, including criminal and consumer investigations and some of our regulatory functions. Within the last year or so, we set up a digital investigations unit within the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, that provides resources to all the investigative and enforcement divisions across the organisation. It is quite small at the moment but we are hoping to staff it up and grow the in-house resources within the divisions.

The prevalence of white-collar crime is the great question for us. The problem with white-collar crime is its degree of invisibility. There is no dead body or smoking gun. The existence of the crime has to be proven before proving who did it. However, there is much evidence to suggest that price fixing and bid rigging cartels are prevalent. I refer to public procurement, in particular. I mentioned some we have investigated in the last couple of years.

International estimates from the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, suggest the rate of overcharge is between 20% and 30%. Considering annual State spending of approximately €16 billion on goods and services, if even 1% of it was subject to price fixing or bid rigging, a surcharge of 20% or 30% would be a substantial sum of money.