ONE IN three households at risk of poverty is headed by a person with a job, an Oireachtas committee has heard.
Social Justice Ireland director Fr Seán Healy told the Oireachtas committee on social protection a proposal to make tax credits refundable to benefit the “working poor” would cost €140 million.
Fr Healy said 113,000 people on low incomes would benefit from the measure and when children and other adults living in households were taken into account, the number of beneficiaries would grow to 240,000.
“One in three households at risk of poverty is headed by a person with a job,” Fr Healy said.
He presented a study entitled Building a fairer Tax System: the Working Poor and the Cost of refundable Tax Credits, conducted by Dr Micheal Collins and Robert Ryan of Trinity College Dublin.
“Dr Collins was a member of the Government’s Commission on Taxation that published its report last autumn,” he added.
Fr Healy claimed the Department of Finance had calculated the proposal would cost €3 billion, while he believed the figure would be €140 million.
“It is a great pity that so many of the working poor and their families had been deprived of the benefits of such an initiative for almost a decade because successive ministers for finance accepted the costing provided by the department,” Fr Healy said.
“Governments and ministers for finance in particular, need to take great care to ensure that their policy initiatives are based on real evidence and not on assertion.”
The department rejected Fr Healy’s claims about its costing. “The department’s costing relates to a different time period, a different set of beneficiaries and a different set of assumptions about benefit levels and restrictions,” a spokesman said.
Fine Gael TD Michael Ring told the committee the proposal would be a good way of rewarding people for working. Labour TD Roisín Shortall called the proposal “very worthwhile”. She added: “We have a responsibility as a committee to further this proposal.”
