Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats)
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47. To ask the Minister for Finance his views on adjusting the calculation for Covid-19 wage subsidy to be based on annual average wages to compensate for seasonal variations in income for some professions. [8212/20]

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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The Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme (TWSS) was legislated for in section 28 of the recently enacted Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020.

Deputies will be aware that the TWSS is an emergency measure to deal with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy.

Of necessity, the underlying legislation and the scheme itself were developed really quickly, having regard to the urgent Government objective of getting much needed assistance to employers and employees, where businesses have been seriously affected by the pandemic and the necessary restrictions introduced to fight the spread of the Covid-19 virus.

It must be accepted that the TWSS cannot be adapted to meet the particular circumstances of individual employers or employees.

In the context of the compelling need for immediate implementation of the TWSS, the scheme necessarily had to build on data returned to Revenue through its real-time PAYE system. The key conditions of the scheme, as prescribed in the underlying law, are that –

- the business is suffering significant negative economic impact due to the pandemic,

- the employees were on the payroll at 29 February 2020, and

- the employer had fulfilled its PAYE reporting obligations for February 2020 before, in general, 15 March 2020, but extended recently to 1 April 2020.

The latter two conditions were particularly designed with a view to preventing abuse of the scheme and there are no plans for these to be revisited at present.