Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 22 January 2019

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Scrutiny of Tax Expenditures: Discussion

Mr. Joe Cullen:

I made the point in our opening statement that there are differences the information Revenue presents on its website and that information has been presented over a long number of years in pretty much the same format. It was not intended to be a policy interpretation of whether the particular items are tax expenditures of benchmark items; it is simply a list. There would be benefit in an exercise that would seek to identify and get agreement on what is the benchmark for a period of, say, one year, three years or five years. That could then be reviewed periodically and that may well change as circumstances change. I have no problem with the proposition that there ought to be a benchmark list of expenditures that would be taken for the time being as part of the system.