A public consultation on tax measures to encourage entrepreneurs and small business, and how they could be improved is underway. This Institute’s position is that the negative discrimination which hammers the self-employed and surcharges their success has to stop. The ineffective tax reliefs for start-up companies should be replaced with useable funding incentives.

Launching the consultation the Minister for Finance said “I want to know what tax-related barriers you feel there is to establishing new enterprises, and what can done to overcome these barriers”. Our response will point out, yet again, that there is a tax related barrier when a self employed person starting a new enterprise will pay more tax than an employed person on the same earnings, because they get no Employee Tax Credit and pay the 3% USC surcharge on their success. We will also point out that unusable tax “incentives” like the re-badged but unchanged Seed Capital Relief and the Start-up relief for companies currently serve only to block the introduction of genuine incentives.

The consultation period runs until 14 July. The consultation document can be found on the Department of Finance website. Chartered Accountants Ireland as part of CCAB-I will publish its response which will be available in the next issue of tax.point.