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

I would welcome any action by the Government on this matter and indeed the raid on that site that followed the question I raised with the Minister. The problem is that it has not come with a proper outcome. The workers involved received notification from Revenue that they started their employment in August following the question I raised here in July, even though they were on site in July and would have got the workers' details then and the workers were employed from April or May. What was going on before August? Are the subcontractor and main contractor being held accountable for the fact that there was undoubtedly tax fraud going on prior to that? Still the record has not been rectified.

The difference between net and gross is very important. In 2009, for example, there was €436 million gross tax paid under RCT. The offsets were €490 million, meaning that the revenue for RCT net was minus €53 million. Less than no tax came in from RCT. There were probably 60,000 or 70,000 workers under that heading, with no tax coming in. By comparison, under pay as you earn, PAYE, tax, there would be hundreds of millions of euro in tax. That is the comparison we need to get to because the public is losing tax revenue because of bogus self-employment.

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