Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We will see how we go. I thank Deputy Murphy for putting forward this Bill and I will be supporting it. The basic principle is very good, that we should have transparency in tax. People want to know what the hell is going on with their taxes, where they are being spent and what services and other areas of expenditure those taxes are supporting. The basic principle of the Bill is very good indeed and long overdue. I also thank Deputy Murphy for the table because it is very helpful. While I accept Deputy Doherty's point about the ease with which one might use online calculators, I am not quite up to that level of Internet use that it would be that easy for me to do it. I would have to get someone with a bit more technical proficiency to assist me in these matters. I suspect an awful lot of people would not necessarily know how to access this information.

To have the details set out in front of us in this way is very helpful. I suspect many people would like this sort of information to see the priorities for expenditure in different areas and to be able to debate them. All of that is useful. One particular use, if I could make a slightly political point, is that we could discover by comparing the year-on-year figures that payment or non-payment of the household charge made no difference at all to the amount of expenditure on local government. The budgets were cut prior to the introduction of the charge. It would help us give lie to the claim made by the Government that the household charge boosted expenditure on local services.

It would also be helpful in indicating the degree to which ordinary taxpayers are bailing out the banks in this country and across Europe as a result of a crisis those banks created and visited upon ordinary people, who then picked up the tab for them. It would highlight how, if we were not bailing out banks and if we repudiated the odious debts that have been imposed on ordinary people, more than €1,000 of the average worker's tax could be spent on health and education and other public services. That would be useful information for people to have and I suspect it would fuel their anger at the injustice of the bank bailout.

I support this idea, although there is a lot of work to do on it. I am sure Deputy Murphy would want this to be scrutinised and gone over on Committee Stage because some valid points have been raised about the administrative costs and the best way to do that. I would favour people receiving a statement in the post that sets the figures out in a clear way they can understand.

Deputy McGrath made a valid point about those in work and paying tax and those who are not. We would have to think about that because we could not have a situation where some privileged group was highlighted as paying taxes and would get this information whereas those who are unemployed through no fault of their own are somehow made to feel as if they are not contributing to society.

We need to think carefully about that issue and I am not sure what the answer is.

I generally commend the Bill and will support it moving to the next Stage where we can scrutinise it further. However, we need more information than provided for in the Bill on the issue of tax transparency. It is not just about the proportion of the tax that people pay as allocated to particular services. There are other serious issues relating to taxation that people want to know about. Those could be added to some sort of information pack to be sent to people in order to give them information about tax. We should certainly include, possibly in pie-chart form, details of the proportions of tax paid by the different sectors of society. It should show how much tax in total is paid and then how much of it coming from the corporate sector, the PAYE sector, the self-employed, excise and so on - and how much is not coming from financial transactions tax, for example. That would also give people important information about how the tax system is structured and allow them to participate in the debate on how we should structure our tax system, which is, after all, the most urgent issue for the country at the moment.

I have tabled many parliamentary questions in order to get to grips with how our tax system works but it is quite difficult. I eventually get the information in lengthy tables showing earnings in different deciles and so on. It would need to be given in a more digestible form. People would be very interested to know that ordinary PAYE workers and the self-employed had gross earnings last year of €83 billion and they paid €18 billion in tax, whereas the corporate sector had profits before adjustments and allowances of €70 billion but only paid €4 billion in tax. That sort of information would be very interesting for people. It shows the effective tax rate for ordinary taxpayers at approximately 30% whereas the effective tax rate for the corporate sector, generating tens of billions of euro in profits was only 6% or 6.5%, before write-downs and allowances are taken into account. It would be useful and helpful for people to get a breakdown of what sectors are paying tax and in what proportions.

I would like to know more about tax reliefs and allowances - tax foregone. Corporate tax is one area, but there are a large number of tax breaks and allowances, some of which are a mystery, affecting the effective tax rates for individual PAYE and self-employed earners. People would like to know more about these and that sort of information could be included in a tax transparency Bill. In the area of corporate tax there is €70 billion of gross profits and then there is a series of allowances. For example one is titled "other deductions" and amounts of up to €4 billion. What is that? On that basis the corporate sector is able to write down its tax liability to the point that it is paying a fraction in percentage terms of the tax that ordinary workers are paying. It is an incredible anomaly that a bank - when the banks were making profits - was paying a fraction of tax that the cleaning lady, cleaning the floors of the bank, was paying. People would like that information.

People would also be very interested in getting a further breakdown of expenditure within the political system. How much is being spent on foreign trips and foreign conferences? What is the expenditure on hotels? What are the per diemexpenses? People would love to have that information and would have something to say about it. I am not saying that none of that expenditure is justified - of course some of it is. It is necessary as part of a global political and economic system to have trips abroad. However, the public has the right to scrutinise in greater detail the extent of the expenditure and make judgments on what is justified and legitimate and what is not. That would generate necessary oversight and accountability on the issue of people's tax expenditure.

How much time do I have remaining?

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