Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I fear there is a big black hole in the budget and it is around the issue of stamp duty and the expected yield. I raised this during Committee Stage. Experts are suggesting that it could be €2 billion to €2.5 billion of commercial property transactions in 2017. The Minister's figures are estimated on a yield of transactions of about €4.5 billion which is way off what analysts such as Jones Lang Laselle, experts in the field, have suggested.

Second, there are no anti-avoidance measures built into this. I asked a Parliamentary Question on the matter which was answered two days ago. The Minister said he would deal with it during further stages of the Finance Bill. We are at the last stage here and I do not see it. We had Davys tell us after budget day that they expect tax avoidance measures to pop up again as a result of stamp duty because what happened in the past when stamp duty was at 9% was that assets were put into special purpose vehicles and thus availed of the 1% stamp duty rather than the 9%. When stamp duty was reduced to 2% that incentive was not there because the differential was not that much but now that it has increased to 6% they are saying that it is likely there will be tax avoidance issues. I can see no measure here that deals with that so that it is possible to structure assets into special purpose vehicles, sell them on and then sell the shares on with a liability to pay 1% rather than 6%.

The other, bigger issue relates to the stability of this policy. The commission has echoed what we said on budget night, namely that it is a very unstable type of tax and the Government is basing a lot of its budgetary arithmetic on increased resources that are made available to different expenditure heads on it. The Minister needs to listen to what the commission said in its report over the last couple of days.

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