In tax terms, the significance of the Government's own report on its progress on the Programme for Government in its first year in office lies more in what they didn't, rather than in what they did do.

The key message remains the immutability of the corporation tax rate. In mentioning R&D, there are improvements to the regime for the Small and Medium Enterprise sector. To be fair to the document, since it doesn't claim that the income tax “trickle down” of the credit to employees will benefit SMEs – it won't, because of the way it's constructed. The report also correctly claims some improvements, for example in relation to the Universal Social Charge exemption threshold.

Some of the approaches in the document are somewhat more challenging – it certainly hadn't occurred to us that the increase in the standard rate of VAT to 23% was anything other than an increase, rather than a VAT rate limiting exercise as it is billed in the report. We also have a Tax and Social Welfare Commission, a group whose remit apparently didn't extend to ensuring that the government agency responsible for paying pensions wouldn't create nasty surprises for the government agency responsible for taxing them.

The idea of introducing a Single Business Tax for micro enterprises has been dropped. The original idea behind this was to have both a single return and point of payment for both the direct and indirect taxes suffered by small businesses, and it is an idea which has been kicking around for at least 10 years. The big difficulty is to devise a system which fairly reflects the liability to the fiduciary taxes, most importantly VAT and PAYE, without distorting competitive advantage between different types of business. It may not in fact be ever possible to do so.

The full report is available from http://www.merrionstreet.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/FINAL-Web-Version.pdf.