A CCAB-I delegation met with Minister for Finance Mr Michael Noonan and his officials at the Ministers office on 1 November. The Minister is fully conversant with both the domestic and international tax issues affecting the Budget arithmetic, allowing us to highlight directly to him the main proposals being made by the accountancy profession.

Over the course of the very productive meeting, we focussed on using the tax system to assist indigenous business, stay competitive in a multinational environment, and assist people in planning for retirement.

The CCAB-I representatives suggested to the Minister that tax increases were unhelpful to economic growth. We also stated that while there had been an understandable backlash against tax incentives following the negative experience associated with many of the property reliefs, tax incentives still remained an important tool for economic management. We pointed towards the evidence of the Jobs Initiative of 2011 in support of this statement.

In our view, Finance Act 2012 had done a lot for the multinational sector but perhaps less for indigenous industry. Businesses are struggling to raise capital, and the new EIIS arrangements were neither performing as well as the old BES nor as well as comparable reliefs in the UK. We also discussed with the Minister the need to reward innovative individuals using a more targeted replacement for the old Patents Exemption scheme.

Minister Noonan is very aware of the competitive international environment and we discussed with him the merits of improving the Special Assignee Relief Program for expatriates coming into Ireland, and the Foreign Earnings Deduction for individuals marketing Irish goods and services abroad.

Lastly we engaged with the Minister on policy issues relating both to sustaining an environment whereby people will save for their retirement, and in relation to the investment opportunities available to pension funds. We outlined our suggestions for the creation of an investment vehicle whereby pension funds could invest directly in negative equity properties, without necessitating a refund of pension contributions on the part of the individual.

The Minister and his officials indicated to us that the quality of the CCAB-I commentary and analysis was high, and that they welcomed the points we had made. The Minister observed that some of the more technical areas we discussed were appropriate to the Finance Bill as well as to the Budget, and stressed that we should use the window of opportunity between the Budget and the Finance Bill to engage further.

The CCAB-I delegation comprised Liam Lynch, partner KPMG and chairman of the tax committee, Enda Faughnan, partner PwC, Brian Purcell, principal, Purcell McQuillan and Brian Keegan, Director of Taxation at the Institute.