Eugene Regan (Fine Gael)

The Minister should be drawing up the guidelines as to how the law is to be applied and we should not be handing over such significant powers to Revenue.

The current provision in section 1002 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 states, "Any amount of money due by the relevant person to the taxpayer as emoluments under a contract of service shall not be regarded as a debt due to the taxpayer", and it is proposed to reverse this in one fell swoop. I still have not seen the justification for it. It is an arbitrary power that we are handing over and it makes for bad legislation.