Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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22. To ask the Minister for Finance the estimated annual cost of the extension in budget 2015 of tax breaks for leasing agricultural land; if he will provide a breakdown of the number of persons and the number of companies benefitting from these tax breaks each year since they were introduced; the benefit per person and per company; and if any analysis has been carried out of the income distributional effects of existing and future tax breaks for the leasing of agricultural land. [41750/14]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy may be aware that I commissioned a review of the tax reliefs available to the farming sector, in conjunction with my colleague the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, in last year's Budget. This process entailed three distinct processes:

- A public consultation

- An independent cost benefit analysis

- An international comparison with other jurisdictions

An inter-Departmental working group was established comprising officials from the Department of Finance, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) and the Revenue Commissioners to oversee the review and report to both Ministers.

The report of the working group, including the report of the independent economic consultants Indecon, was published as a Budget publication and is available on my Department's website. This report is a very thorough analysis of the tax reliefs available for leasing of agricultural land, as well as a range of other tax measures available to the sector.

I am informed by the Revenue Commissioners that the cost of the scheme in the 2012 tax year (the most recent year for which data are currently available) is estimated at €7.3m and the number of taxpayers availing was 3,980.

Figures for previous tax years are available in Revenue's Statistical Reports, available on the Commissioners' website at , in the "Income Tax" chapter of each year (Table IT6). Updates will be published on the Commissioners' website in due course.

As regards the extension to tax measures for land leasing announced in the Budget, the following estimated costs were given at Budget time for these extensions.