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

I intend to press this to a vote. I want to respond to some of the responses the Minister gave to me this afternoon on the issue of bogus self-employment. His answers on the number of people categorised as self-employed in the construction industry were disingenuous and bordering on misleading the Dáil. I have been trying to establish the precise facts on how many are in the RCT system. The Minister effectively misled the Dáil on the related question on the amount of revenue coming back in under the self-employment tax heading of RTC.

Let me correct the record on the assertions the Minister made, starting with the numbers and letters. I checked the letters the Minister sent me and I have also checked others that were sent to him from Ms Patricia King of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. I cross-checked the information with answers the Department has given to Deputies who have asked similar questions.

On 19 July 2016, in response to parliamentary questions tabled by Deputy Ruth Coppinger, Nos. 168 and 169, on the numbers registered on the RCT, e-RCT and C45 tax systems working in construction from 2002 to 2015, the Minister indicated in a table that there were 74,795 under the heading "RTC registrations/active contractors (principals & sub-contractors)". In the Minister's response to me earlier, he suggested he had been accurate in giving an answer that suggested there were 35,000. He said the higher figure, of 74,795, or nearly 75,000, relates to people whom those subcontractors had employed. That is misleading. The question asked by Deputy Coppinger, which the Minister answered, was very simple and straightforward. The answer he gave for 2015 was 74,795.

To further confuse the pitch, Deputy Michael McGrath's office, which has been also asking questions, was informed at one point that the number was in excess of 90,000. I am not quite sure where that figure came from but I take it in good faith that Deputy McGrath's office got it from the Minister in some shape or form. Therefore, there is a serious mystery here. In the letter to which the Minister referred, from July 2016, he referred to the 35,000 as subcontractors. However, in the answer to Deputy Coppinger, given a few weeks later, he said there were 74,000 principal contractors and subcontractors. The point is that there are 74,000, not 34,000, working in the RTC system. They are not principal contractors. In so far as they could be defined as such, the term "principal contractor" loses all meaning. In reality, we are talking about relatively small subcontractors who, in turn, have ten, 15 or 20 tradesmen, bricklayers or others working for them, all of whom are in the RTC system and defined as self-employed for revenue purposes. They number 74,000 and whether they call themselves "subcontractors" or "principal contractors" is totally irrelevant. The point is that 74,000 are classified as self-employed out of a total construction workforce of 130,000. More than half of the construction workforce comprises supposedly self-employed entrepreneurs. That is nonsense and it is misleading for the Minister to suggest I somehow did not understand the figures or misquoted them. It is the Minister who is misleading us as to the reality of this. We keep getting different answers and definitions in letters.

Ms Patricia King also suggested the Minister is misrepresenting the figures on the issue. Following my engagement with him in the Dáil on this issue, which prompted him to ask the Revenue Commissioners to write to me, on 29 July 2016, Patricia King wrote to the Minister and said, among other things, that he misrepresented the position of Congress. She said it was misleading of the Minister to convey any impression that Congress is in any way satisfied with the performance of revenue relating to the bogus self-employment system in this sector. It was stated the Minister is misleading the House, not us. We cannot get to the bottom of this and we keep getting different figures and definitions and so on. Essentially, this is to cover up what I and, more important, people working in the industry believe to be a massive scandal.

Next is the issue of the revenue. The Minister quoted figures today suggesting €132 million came in under the RTC heading in 2013, that the figure for 2014 was €172 million and that the figure for 2015 was €174 million. He did not acknowledge these are the gross figures, not the net figures. Even the gross figures do not tally with figures the Minister's Department has given to other Deputies in this House on that issue. In response to a parliamentary question asked by Deputies Tommy Broughan and Ruth Coppinger, if I remember correctly, the Department stated the gross figure for 2013 was €157 million. The Minister said today it was €132 million although he told Members in response to a parliamentary question that it was €157 million. There is a huge discrepancy in that regard, amounting to approximately €30 million, a significant amount. It is taxpayers' money so we need to know the truth. Which figure is correct? Is it €132 million or €157 million. The difference, approximately €30 million, is a lot of money.

The Minister also misleads us regarding the net figure. The net figure, after repayments, deductions, etc., is only €12.3 million. This is a very far cry from €132 million or €157 million, whichever it happens to be. Similarly, the Minister said the figure for 2014 was €172 million. Figures I have garnered from other data I got from the Minister suggest the gross figure was €201 million, not the €172 million he mentioned today, and that the net figure is €31 million, which is much less. Different figures come from the Minister on different days. It seems to depend on the day.

The Minister mentioned a figure €174 million for 2015, but what was the net figure? That is the one that counts. How much does the Exchequer end up with after repayments? It is much less every other year than the unreliable figures the Minister mentioned.

A further piece of evidence is worth mentioning. I do not understand it fully, but it seems to be related to the major problems encountered in this regard. Recently I asked the Minister's Department "what exactly the Revenue Commissioners mean when they refer to the estimated value of contract and to the degree this should be accurate as to the actual amount earned by the person to whom that contract refers." Today the Minister and Deputy Peter Burke called RCT a good system that gave information on the locations and values of contracts. However, my contacts in the industry tell me that these contract confirmations, as they are called, are not worth the paper on which they are written and that the value of the contract given by the contractor never tallies with the actual amount paid. It is virtually a fictional figure. There is a significant discrepancy between the value of the contract and the actual payments made. This seems to have been borne out by the Minister's answer to me, in that there were 319,114 contracts in the construction sector in 2014 with a value of €28.7 billion, yet the 804,165 payments made only amounted to €10.1 billion. This seems to confirm what my source told me. He has and is willing to provide for the Department contracts the value of each of which is a multiple of what has actually been paid to the supposedly self-employed person whose name is attached to the contract. He cited as an example a contract confirmation in which the value was listed as €25,000 but the worker named only earned €4,800. That is a major discrepancy at a micro level. The contract confirmation provided by the principal contractor for Revenue bears no relationship to the reality on the ground in terms of what the contractor is paying. This forms part of an elaborate tax fraud by such contractors to avoid paying people properly. Revenue, the Minister and his Department do not seem to want to chase down this problem.

This is a significant scandal and tax fraud that we are failing to take seriously. We cannot even get accurate figures. In and of itself, the fact that there is a discrepancy from month to month in the figures we get from the Minister justifies the holding of a serious investigation. We need to get to the bottom of this matter for the sake of the tax revenue being lost to the public and the State and in the light of the abuse and exploitation of tens of thousands of construction workers who are being forced into being misclassified as self-employed when they are really employees of these dodgy subcontractors or, in many instances, large contractors.

That is my case. We may have to argue about it, but we must at the very least get to the bottom of this issue, have it investigated and have the investigation reported on to the Dáil within a minimum of six months, as set down in the amendment.

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