James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all of our attendees from Revenue. From the outset, it is important for members of the committee, myself included, to note how difficult it has been throughout the pandemic. It has not been an easy challenge and they performed quite well overall.

However, I have a number of questions I would like to ask and try to delve into a couple of topics of importance. One area around the debt warehousing that is starting arise a lot in our office with inquiries is small businesses, that is, businesses that might have three or four employees, whether it is a coffee shop, a local hairdressers or otherwise. They may have three or four employees on low wages and revenue of probably less than €200,000 or €250,000 a year to run the expenses of their business, which obviously does not leave much money left over. A number of those businesses would have availed of support schemes at the time, the likes of the employment wages subsidy scheme, EWSS, and others, as a consequence of a drop in revenue and are now facing the prospect of having potentially quite large bills. A number of people in the past number of months have come to me having done their accounts to find that they had overpayments of EWSS and now have to pay back significant amounts of money. In some cases, I have dealt with businesses that have revenues of under €250,000 and have bills to pay back of around €25,000. This is obviously an exceptionally large amount of money for a very small business trying to operate. However, they are the life bread of the rural economy, main streets and towns and villages across the country. We need them to survive to basically give a sense of life within communities. What are Mr. Cody’s concerns about that? We have seen a postponement until 2024. Is this a wise idea, potentially facing into a recession in 2023 or 2024?