Pearse Doherty
Question:148. Deputy Pearse Doherty asked the Minister for Finance the estimated cost in 2020, 2021 and 2022 of extending the SARP scheme in its present from up to 31 December 2022. [42031/19]
View answerTuesday, 15 October 2019
Questions (148)
Written answers
The Special Assignee Relief Programme (SARP) is an income tax incentive designed to help reduce the cost to employers of assigning skilled individuals in their companies from abroad, to take up positions in the Irish-based operations of their employer or an associated company, thereby facilitating the creation of jobs and the development and expansion of businesses in Ireland.
As the Deputy will be aware, earlier this year I commissioned an independent review of SARP. The report of this review (published on Budget day 2019) confirmed the strong policy rationale for the existence and continuation of the relief. Following on from these findings, I announced in my Budget speech that I intend to extend the relief until 31 December 2022.
With regard to the Deputy's specific question, Revenue advise me that it is not possible to estimate accurately the cost of extending the SARP scheme, in its present form, up to 31 December 2022. The reason for this is that there are currently no data available that would enable such calculations to be made.
The Deputy will be aware that in Finance Bill 2018 I re-imposed an upper salary ceiling of €1 million on the relief with effect of 1 January 2019 for new entrants and for existing beneficiaries of the programme from 1 January 2020. Such data as are available within the system relate to years before 2019 (no cap existed between 2015 and 2019). It would therefore be necessary to assess the cost-saving impact of the cap as well as taking account of evolution in the take up of the relief during the current year in order to begin to estimate the savings or costs that might arise in 2020 or subsequent years.