Mr. Martin McMahon:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I will take it from the start, and again the question here is cui bono? Who benefits from this situation? It is not the State and not the workers. It is the employers who are using this practice of bogus self-employment to save themselves circa 30% on labour costs. That is who benefits. If the Revenue is saying that bogus self-employment is not an issue, it should prove it. If it is saying it is an issue, it should quantify it. Otherwise, it is not at this game at all.

On meat processing, what the Deputy is referring to with the agency are intermediary-type set-ups. Those are what we call the workplace with no employees. They are moving or being moved to intermediary-type set-ups, as would be used by the likes of Ryanair. A company with six directors, all of whom are pilots, supplies services to Ryanair exclusively. As the pilots association will confirm, as far as it is concerned, the pilots concerned are employees. The practice of setting up an intermediary company to disguise the reality that people are employees is on the rise. The chairman of the Revenue Commissioners has said there are many thousands of these companies out there. Some of these companies have even received awards from the State for what they are doing. It is ridiculous.

On inspections, this is very interesting. Figures from the Revenue Commissioners on inspections show the number is in the low thousands. Back in 1998, the Comptroller and Auditor General sent officials from the Revenue out to inspect 60,000 employment situations within the construction industry and they found 12,000 of them to be misclassified. Two years later, the Committee of Public Accounts, under the chairmanship of the late Deputy Jim Mitchell, did the same thing. Some 60,000 employment roles were examined and 12,000 were found to be misclassified as self-employed. That is a huge number. It was 18% or 19% back in 1999 and 2000. Now, Revenue is doing at most a couple of thousand inspections per year and is saying it is capturing all the bogus self-employment. How could it?

What changed was the employment status group. A decision was made that the status quomust remain and those wide-scale investigations stopped completely. They have never been repeated in any sector. The level of bogus self-employment within the construction sector according to ICTU is now 23% so it has not decreased over the 20 years since this last came up in this committee. It has increased.