Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 25 November 2021

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:30 am

Photo of Matt CarthyMatt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman. It is good to see him back. I have a couple of points. It is incredibly interesting. This relates to the 1997 decision by Revenue to allow couriers be designated as self-employed. I am not sure it was the couriers themselves who benefitted from that arrangement and would argue it was not. The letter states:

A review of the 1997 letters from Revenue bears out the fact that the individuals in question were required to be self-employed and that the conditions to participate in the “voluntary PAYE scheme” were that the individuals were in fact bona fide self-employed.

It goes on to state:

Bearing in mind the significant lapse of time, the information available to Revenue in relation to matters which occurred over 20 years ago is severely limited, particularly in light of Revenue only having access to information returned in statutory reporting.

There are a number of follow-on questions we need to ask. The first is why only information from statutory reporting is available. Is it the case Revenue does not have access to all documents that were created and gave rise to the agreement? I imagine that would have been standard practice. We need to get an explanation as to why that is not the case. It then sets our criteria for where this self-employed status can be used. It talks about the form of payment being based on milage rather than being a standard pay rate. However, I would have expected the first test of self-employment is whether a person is a free agent and able to operate as a self-employed company - in other words, that they are not intrinsically linked to a single company which is the cause of concern for us. It would be useful if we could get clarification from Revenue in the first instance on this form of documentation. Is it the case it simply does not exist - that it was disappeared - or is it the case it is just hard to find? They are two very different things and that clarification would be useful. I would like to get a further note from Revenue on whether it sees this type of approach as being appropriate in the future, where these types of contracts are concerned.

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