Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Credit Suisse global wealth report 2014 provides a broad range of data in the area of global household wealth and its composition and distribution in the period 2000 to 2014 for over 200 individual countries.  The authors of the report acknowledge that the study of global household wealth is still at an early stage of development and that no country has completely reliable information on personal wealth. This obliged them to assemble and process information from a variety of sources.  The authors state much work remains to be done to refine estimates of wealth by country and improve the estimates of wealth distribution within countries.

I note that the report indicates that Ireland lies in the group of developed economies where the top decile or the wealthiest 10% of adults share greater than 50% of the wealth. This places Ireland towards the lower end of the wealth inequality index in the developed world. As I have stated on a number of occasions, wealth can be taxed in a variety of ways, some of which are in place in Ireland.  Capital gains tax, CGT, and capital acquisitions tax, CAT, are, in effect, taxes on wealth, in that they are levied on an individual or a company on the disposal of an asset or the acquisition of an asset through a gift or an inheritance. Deposit interest retention tax, DIRT, is charged at 41%, with limited exemptions, on interest earned on deposit accounts.  The local property tax, LPT, introduced in 2013 is a tax based on the market value of residential properties.

To estimate the potential revenue from a wealth tax, it would first be necessary to identify the wealth held by individuals.  I am informed by the Revenue Commissioners that they currently have no statistical basis for compiling estimates in relation to a potential wealth tax. Although an individual's assets and liabilities are declared to Revenue in a number of specific circumstances, for example, after a death, this information is not a complete measure of financial assets in the State, nor is it recorded in a manner that would allow analysis of the implications of an overarching wealth based tax.

I am advised that the Central Statistics Office, CSO, institutional sector accounts do not give an indication of the number of households or persons classified by the categories of wealth they hold.  These statistics are based on aggregate information collected from financial institutions and do not contain the demographic details which would enable such a breakdown of the statistics to be given.

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