Mr. Dermot Mulligan:

In early 2022, we established a determination of employment status working group to look at this issue specifically. The group consisted of individuals from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, IBEC, the Construction Federation of Ireland, Irish Small and Medium Employers, ISME, and officials from our own Department, the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Social Protection. That was a cross-agency group that was set up, with representatives of business and employees, to look specifically at issues around employment status, the scale of misclassification, and to discuss the potential to improve systems by which the correct employment status can be determined. We had presentations from, in particular, the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Social Protection, which look carefully at what the status of people are. The scope section of the Department of Social Protection, in particular, has updated its systems in that regard. We also had presentations from the Revenue Commissioners on the way it has developed its systems in that space.

We had a number of meetings last year to look at this issue. We got those presentations, and we got some statistics that I could pass on to the Senator regarding the number of investigations carried out by the Department of Social Protection and the Revenue Commissioners. Where there was an issue raised and an investigation was carried out, the number of misclassifications that they found was a relatively small one, given the number of investigations they had done. I am happy to send that information on to the Senator. A specific multiagency group whose membership included representatives of the social partners, looked at this in a fair bit of detail. That work is ongoing, but the numbers that we were presented with did not indicate a significant issue.