Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that there is serious recognition for the small business and the fact that it may not have the resources or capacity to deal with a very sophisticated tax system, year-on-year, whereas bigger companies have in-house experts in that particular area. We sometimes bring in systems that do not always suit everybody and we need to be able to tailor them. Even at the moment, I see individuals trying to pay the local property tax and if there is a glitch in the system, they just cannot move with it.

To give an example, we have set up very sophisticated ways of dealing with procurement to try to save money. Sometimes I believe we have created an industry called procurement without actually saving money. We have just transferred costs from the base price of the product to the procurement system. The cost of procurement is such now that smaller companies, if they are to compete, have to have in-house expertise in procurement or they have to buy it in. That is something that gets lost when we bring in systems. What is the cost of running these systems within small companies? It is just another part of it. I wish the commission well and I look forward to working with it over the coming months.