Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will deal with the questions the Deputy has put to me about remote working, which is the subject of this section. Overall, employers should bear the cost of providing the equipment that their employees need to work from home. The employer would have to provide that equipment and those facilities anyway were the work to be taking place in a work environment, inside an office or a formal workplace. The issues of equity that the Deputy touched on a moment ago would rise to a far higher level if we ended up in a situation where the taxpayer was subsidising employers for costs that in the pre-pandemic area were borne in their entirety by employers, albeit that they would have been able to claim recognition of them as a business expense. We have to get the balance right in our tax code in terms of how we recognise all of this. In situations where work is transitioning from happening in an office to happening at home, it is up to the employer to bear most, if not all, of the costs involved. We would end up in a situation where there were real issues of equity if taxpayers were to take over responsibility for a whole set of costs that a short while ago they were not bearing at all.

On the question of whether I believe this raises equity issues for those who are not working at home but are bearing some of the costs of providing support for those who are working from home, we must put the issue into the round. My officials will give me an exact figure presently, but the total cost associated with this measure is a very low share of all of the tax that we collect. In that context, the equity issues are not particularly pronounced given that the cost of this scheme overall is not very big. On the question of whether we should be subsidising travel costs associated with going to and coming from work, we should not do any more beyond the recognition that we currently give through things like benefit-in-kind relief. In fact, in a world where we are trying to help and encourage those who can travel less to do so, providing additional tax recognition of journey time would not be consistent with that goal. I think I have addressed all of the issues the Deputy has raised on this section.