Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Perhaps it is something that might be for the committee to consider. We have been discussing tax expenditures generally and we have looked at some of them specifically. We have characterised them to some extent as a shadow budget, in that they are directed towards certain policy objectives but they are treated differently from direct expenditures. We have questioned them and suggested there should be a hell of lot more scrutiny of them. Is there any good reason they should not be included in this? They are large amounts of money that are spent to achieve certain policy objectives and yet, because they are not scrutinised, we do not really know whether they actually deliver their policy objectives. Our committee has been pushing that they should be more in the spotlight during the budgetary process so that the Government should have to justify the rolling over of certain tax expenditures, introducing new tax expenditures or deciding to get rid of certain tax expenditures that may have outlived their usefulness or are not achieving what they supposed to achieve. What would Dr. Moran think about us trying to bring tax expenditures into all of this?