Mr. Joe Cullen:

I will take the last question first. There would be no problem providing a list of tax expenditures that do not have a sunset clause. That would be useful to advance the entire process of looking at tax expenditures.

In terms of international comparisons, to be frank we have not as yet looked at how our tax expenditures compare internationally with other countries. However, we have come a long way in the past ten years from a position where, prior to the work of the Commission on Taxation, nobody would have had a decent handle on the extent of tax expenditures, the various areas where tax expenditures occurred and whether some of those could be considered part of the basic tax system or whether they are more discretionary. In short, there is further work to be done in terms of where we stand internationally. There may well be data readily available in other OECD or EU countries. We can have a look at those data and there would be no problem providing them to the committee alongside the other information.