Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wonder what is happening to the Revenue Commissioners.

Like the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, the Revenue Commissioners deal with vast amounts of personal data and queries individual to the person. That information is really important to people. The current changes being made by the Revenue Commissioners concerning smallscale employers, such as a person employing a child minder in his or her house or at the child minder's house, are generating great numbers of requests for parents, very often the mum, to comply with a huge number of new regulations. All of this detail is currently and quite properly located with the Revenue Commissioners, and it is hard enough to get an answer from them as it is very confusing currently. It is the same with social welfare queries, as both the Taoiseach and I know.

I do not get why everything should be under one roof, when the nature of some queries, like to Revenue and the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, are so specific to the individual, that citizens need a trusted source to which they can go, instead of some kind of public relations outfit. Under the current changes, people will have to keep going down from the upper and opening elements of the site into the parts of the information system they really need.

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