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

There are 220,000 to 230,000 people who are classified as self-employed with no paid employees. I put it to the Minister, as construction workers and others in this House have been putting it to him for a long time, that the reason for that, particularly in construction, is bogus self-employment. One of the workers I mentioned is a labourer. When he telephoned Revenue to ask if he was down on the PAYE system, because his employer said he was taken on as a PAYE worker, he was told that he had probably been classified as self-employed. He is a labourer. How could he be self-employed? It is ridiculous. This is rampant in construction. From a tax point of view, if we look at 2008, for example, when there was 126,000 self-employed relevant contracts tax, RCT, workers, there was a minus figure in tax revenue of €67 million. This tax head loses money in many cases or gives no tax revenue compared to similar numbers of PAYE workers who brought in €700 million in tax revenue in that year. Is the same thing going on now. Is the Minister looking into it seriously to investigate these kinds of abuses?

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