Joe O'Toole (Independent)

The Government needs to call for a dissolution of the boards, re-establish them and put back on them the good people. We need to ensure that all bonuses, directors' perks and €1 million salaries per year are done away with immediately and the level of due diligence and oversight of the way the banks do their business is made clear. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2000 in the US makes chief financial officers of large companies subject to criminal prosecution and imprisonment in the event of their acting recklessly and carelessly. Significantly, we do not have such legislation. I have a vested interest in this as a member of the audit and accounts supervisory authority. We need to ensure that the directive on global accountancy standards is brought forward quickly and that the quality assurance demands in Commissioner McCreevy's recent speeches are included in that.

It is a fact that the Minister of State and I disagreed on an issue previously. I ask him to recall his speech on credit unions some years back and to read it again. He was not right. There was a run on a number of credit unions a couple of weeks ago and they almost closed down until the Government included them in the €100,000 deposit guarantee. That was the point we made. We did anticipate that. The Minister of State and I disagreed on it. It was bound to happen at some stage and it happened on this occasion. The Government's intervention on the credit unions has been hugely important but I want to know how it will work. At that time we said it could happen in two ways, either as a separate stand-alone system of support and guarantee or parallel to the one for the banks. It is an indication of what it is that can be done and what it is that can be anticipated. That was anticipated.

I began by praising the Department of Finance. The Department of Finance has known for almost ten years that there is a problem with the credit union legislation. It continues to promise to change it and to introduce a new Bill but it has not happened. It is a classic example of why procrastination can be a problem.

The Minister of State referred to the September tax returns. Those returns are important. The October and November tax returns for the self-employed are much more important. Every year at this time I telephone a couple of bosses of middle-size accountancy firms around the country and ask them what their returns will be. They have always been accurate. For what it is worth, I contacted two of them this week and asked what they expect their returns to be to the Exchequer from their self-employed people at the end of next month or early November. They both said separately, without one knowing what the other had said, that there would be a 25% drop. That is significant and a much greater drop than the Government expected. I hope it is not true but the indicators have been right previously. There is much work to be done. I look forward to seeing the legislation and discussing it later.