Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I have some questions. If members wish, there will be a second round of questions. First, I would like to do some housekeeping on behalf of the committee relating to the consideration that was given to this matter during the Thirty-second Dáil and the report thereon that was written. The tax strategy group in the Department of Finance subsequently made a report that, from my reading, was very much an answer to the work of both the Parliamentary Budget Office, PBO, and the predecessor to this committee. The immediacy of that report to the work done in the Oireachtas meant the language used included a lot of "we will consider" and "we will do work on this". Will the officials from the Department of Finance give a general update on the work that has been done in this regard since then?

In the original report by the PBO in 2019, one of the requests was that there be a shared list between Revenue and the Department of Finance and some kind of clarity around why some things are considered tax expenditures and others are not. Some concern expressed was on the issue of sunset clauses, which I may have time to comment on presently. Will the witnesses also comment on data and measurements that are calculated ex ante? There needs to be clarity for everyone around the measurement of whether a tax expenditure is working well. I do not know whether they have that information.