Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

114. To ask the Minister for Finance if his attention has been drawn to reports that leading global tax researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Copenhagen (details supplied) have identified Ireland as a major tax haven and estimate that Ireland artificially attracts €130 billion in profits from other countries and gains €7.2 billion in tax revenue from this profit shifting; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3109/23]

Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I understand that the Deputy is referring to a report "The Missing Profits of Nations" that examines attribution of profits by multinational enterprises (MNEs) around the world.

The central analysis of the paper looks at links between the level of profit booked, and the level of wages paid in a country. This creates a misleading impression that corporate profits are or should be directly linked to wage levels rather than to the outputs of investment in all income generating activities such as investment in R&D, intangible assets, capital intensive machinery and investment in staff etc. A small country with high levels of high value adding FDI relative to the size of the domestic economy will of course appear like an outlier in this type of analysis.

Ireland has a competitive corporation tax rate, an attractive and stable tax regime and a strong reputation and commitment to transparency. Ireland’s tax regime is designed to encourage the location of real, substantive and high-value adding investment in the country. This is evidenced by the substantial number of NMEs who have chosen Ireland as their home and the hundreds of thousands of both direct and indirect jobs they contribute to the economy.

Ireland is a strong supporter of the BEPS process and has fully implemented both Anti-Tax Avoidance Directives within all agreed timeframes. Furthermore, Ireland fully supports the two pillared solution to address the challenges brought about by the digitalisation of the economy.

Having recently agreed to the EU Minimum Tax Directive that ensures the MNEs will pay a minimum effective tax rate of 15% it is my intention to bring forward legislation in this years Finance Bill which will transpose Directive into domestic legislation.