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

These amendments seek to do two things, to see how this knowledge development box which is a limited tax loophole, intersects with other tax loopholes that I referred to, and what is the overall benefit to the companies that benefit from this and potentially other tax loopholes. The sum total of all these loopholes, the deductions and allowances allowed to the corporate sector generally, of which this is yet another, results in the loss of billions of euro, not €50 million, which one can see in Revenue's figures. This is part of that architecture and it will expand. I want to scotch it before it gets off the ground because we saw what the double Irish did. It expanded to extraordinary levels of tax avoidance by corporations.

That is one aspect. We need to know how it intersects and whether companies are benefiting from multiple tax breaks of which this would be one. We also need to know, and this should not be left to the Minister, and the committees need to scrutinise how much money is forgone so that we can count the extent and value of this tax break and decide whether this money would be better spent elsewhere. That is the logic of it. Even if the Minister of State does not agree with my philosophical perspective on the knowledge development box it seems to me this is vital information to be able to monitor and judge the benefit and effectiveness of such a tax break.

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