Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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202. To ask the Minister for Finance the number of persons considered for tax purposes to be sub-contractors in the State for each of the past five years; and if he will provide a breakdown of these figures into sectors. [45172/14]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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I am informed by the Revenue Commissioners that the practice of sub-contracting operates in a number of sectors.  Data on the overall numbers, however, is not available as a sub-contractor will not generally describe him/herself as such when registering with Revenue. 

However, three specific sectors are covered by the Relevant Contracts Tax (RCT) regime, namely, construction, forestry and meat processing.  I am informed by the Revenue Commissioners that the number of sub-contractors in the State in these sectors for the past five years is set out in the table below.  For years 2010 and 2011 the figures represent the number of active registrations.  The electronic Relevant Contracts Tax system went live in 2012 and the information provided from 2012 onwards relates to the number of active sub-contractors who received a payment that falls within the RCT regime.  The reason for the large variation in the numbers before 2012 is that a significant amount of work was done to update the RCT register upon the introduction of the electronic Relevant Contracts Tax system.

A small number of sub-contractors in construction, forestry and meat processing operate in more than one of these sectors so an element of estimation has been applied to the percentages shown.  The data is not available to provide a breakdown prior to 2012.  In addition, for the construction sector, it is not possible to provide a breakdown of the numbers engaged in the various building trades.