Mr. Billy Irwin:

I am a tax adviser based in Limerick and, like those of Ms Clarke, many of my clients are small and medium businesses. I work in a pay and file system that works very well because of the input of three groups, namely, the taxpayer, the Revenue and the tax adviser.

I will concentrate on the pay side of pay and file. The collection is outstanding. It is an extremely effective mechanism that has worked and been developed over the years among all the stakeholders.

The collection of tax fits into a natural cycle. Good advice has always been that if one has money to collect, collect it when the money is available. To illustrate that, I will fit the cycle of farming to the collection of the taxes, and it can be applied to many small businesses. In farming, income is typically low in the earlier part of the year. There is a good deal of expenditure and a lot of work carried out. Contractor, veterinary and other expenses are incurred in the early part of the year but the flow of income starts to run from late April, May and June through to the autumn. The expenditure is incurred in the early part of the year but the contractors, the veterinarians and the small businesses that supply them are paid over the course of that income flow during the summer.

The suggestion to bring pay and file into June and that people will be asked to pay taxes on money they have not got is a high risk strategy that endangers breaking a system that is working very well. People are attuned to the cash flow cycle in October. They manage their businesses with that in mind but, most importantly, they have earned the money to pay their bills and their taxes, and they are doing it to a very high degree of compliance.