Mr. Gerard Brady:

If I had to call out one, particularly around chapter 9 which is focused on enterprise, I would highlight recommendation 9.2 on the use of feedback statements and roadmaps for SMEs. That is a really welcome recommendation from our perspective in that corporate and large taxpayers have roadmaps produced by the Department of Finance that tell them what legislation is going to change over the course of three years and what the environment is going to look like. They plan towards that and those things are followed through but for SMEs there is no equivalent. SMEs are kind of going from Finance Bill to Finance Bill to see what they might get. Often schemes are introduced on budget day and when we see the Finance Bill the scheme does not work for whatever reason. We need better use of that kind of long-term roadmap or strawman approach to produce a kind of tax scheme before the Finance Bill so people can feed back into it. We need to let SMEs do that.

Doing that very effectively on corporate tax would be a very positive one.

I refer to equity investment and angel investors. The employment investment incentive, EII, scheme is hugely important for equity investment, for a number of reasons. The first one is that we have a pretty small pool in the country for equity investment relative to other countries. That scheme does a huge amount to bring in more and allow investment in companies throughout their life, or at least in their first seven to eight years. There are two things that could improve that. The first would be a recommendation from the commission to allow angel investors and investors from outside to use the scheme and invest in EII companies. It would expand the base of equity and expand the amount that was available for investment at a time when, because of rising interest rates, we are seeing a shortage of capital for companies, particularly SMEs.

On allowing losses, many people have pulled back a bit from investing in SMEs because they are afraid of losing money and obviously in challenging environments that happens. If losses were allowed to be written off through the scheme against capital gains tax, CGT, it would help immensely in terms of the risk appetite for people investing through the scheme.