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

Deputy Boyd Barrett's main charge is, effectively, that putting a knowledge development box into Irish tax law is motivated by a desire to facilitate large corporations to avoid tax. It is essentially the charge the Deputy has laid here. The origins of the patent boxes and the knowledge development box in this form come from the OECD and the European Commission. In recent years, both those bodies have carried out a full frontal onslaught on the corporate sector for avoiding taxes. The design of the knowledge development box, which is to replace various patent boxes around Europe, is in accordance with the guidelines set down by the OECD and agreed by the Commission. Therefore it is contrary to Deputy Boyd Barrett's supposition that it is some kind of a device to magnify avoidance. It is the opposite and it is fully in line with the guidelines set down by the OECD.

Deputy Doherty's point concerned evaluating various things we do. In budget 2014, eight different reports were published on corporation tax in Ireland. Those very full reports are still available and I would refer Deputies to them. The Deputy will recall that we made fairly significant initiatives in that particular budget and we backed it up with data. Before we introduced the knowledge development box in the budget of October this year, we had a consultative process. We sent a consultation paper around to interested parties and that is publicly available, as are the submissions that came in. Beyond that it would not really be fruitful to do something in nine months time. I do not believe we would have sufficient data to do anything valid, but we are committed to doing it in 2020 when we would have about three years of data from the Revenue Commissioners which we could evaluate.

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