Dr. Barra Roantree:

As the committee has done, we very much highlighted tax expenditure as an area where there is a dearth of information. We do not know the most expensive tax expenditure because we do not have very good costings, if we have any at all, for some of the tax measures one might think are very significant, such as capital gains tax, principal private residence relief or forgiveness on debt. This is one area in particular that we called out.

Our final chapter recommends the provision of greater access to suitably anonymised administrative data to support public research. It also recommends programmes of support for researchers using the data in universities, research institutes and elsewhere. Ireland has really fallen behind in this area. In many countries, particularly the Nordic countries, there is much greater use of administrative data by researchers in government, universities, think tanks and research centres. We are getting to grips with this here only very slowly, and there is a lot we can learn from that. There are ways of doing this that adequately protect people's privacy and ensure the records used are anonymised. This is an area in which we have set out that a lot more can be done in a decade or two decades when the next Commission on Taxation and Welfare comes into being, if there is one. I hope it will be in a much better place than we were just by virtue of the facilitation of researchers, in particular, to analyse the issues and data and bring insights from that into the policy debate.