Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will come to my other questions. Regarding bogus self-employment, there was a Supreme Court judgment last October about the misclassification of workers. Will Revenue be engaging with businesses which engage in widespread misclassification for a sustained period to ensure that there are supports for workers who were affected or indeed that adverse effects have been mitigated? For example, workers may have been misclassified in the past. It is not just the individuals who take the Supreme Court case but other workers who may be affected by similar practices. Has their misclassification been addressed? Has there been engagement with businesses or indeed the sectors to address those issues following that Supreme Court decision?

Somewhat linked to that, I would like if Mr. Cody could address questions on a specific issue that concerns PhD researchers in the State. We know that section 193 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 provides that income arising from a scholarship is exempt from income tax, USC and PRSI where certain conditions are met. Among the conditions are that the scholarship is being held by a person who is in full-time instruction at the university, college, school or other establishment; and that the object of the scholarship is the promotion of the education of the holder rather than the promotion of research or other work through the holder. We have this ambiguity whereby PhD researchers and PhD workers who are not classified as workers but who, in some cases, are teaching or producing research for the university are not paying tax and, because they are not taxed or paying these PRSI contributions, they do not qualify for some key employment protections like the minimum wage, sick leave or maternity leave. I have read reports that when some researchers have engaged with the Revenue Commissioners to ask if they should be paying tax, the Revenue Commissioners have signalled that they might be required to pay tax on their stipends, especially in the circumstance where they are not receiving full-time education or if the work they are doing is not necessarily solely serving their education but is more like something they are doing in order to have the means to be able to afford to stay in education. Could that be addressed? There is a significant issue here. It builds from the issue of the misclassification of workers. Now there is a question where PhD workers find themselves in a limbo where they are not classified as employees, they are not required to or allowed to make PRSI contributions, and they are therefore not getting any of the social security entitlements that come with that. At the same time, those they are working for believe they should not be classified as employees, but the advice individuals are getting from the Revenue Commissioners is somewhat at odds with that.