Mr. Niall Cody:

No. It is far too early for that.

Many of the businesses that have availed of debt warehousing have also been supported by the wage subsidy schemes and the Covid restrictions support scheme, CRSS. That is a common feature. Warehousing debt is only useful to a business when it is trading. It has to have the liability to warehouse it in the first place. An interesting feature about the warehousing is that the first debts went into warehousing in January or February 2020 before Covid restricted anything. Those businesses would have had a normal January or February. That forms the seed capital of the warehousing system.

One of the most interesting features of the system is the number of businesses that warehoused debt and that have subsequently paid it. They have not put all of their liabilities into the warehouse. This reflects how some of them are probably doing a little better than others. Having debt on the balance sheet is not what businesses want if they can pay it off.

The advantage of the Revenue warehousing system is that there is zero interest. Throughout 2020 and 2021, I read a great deal of commentary from business representative groups that there was a low uptake of some of the loan schemes and asking why any business would take up one of the loan schemes when it could warehouse its tax liability and use that as funding capital at a 0% interest rate during the period.