Social Welfare Payments Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-23 ============================================================ Sharon Keogan (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach. It is great to see the Minister here. I wish to raise a matter that, while it may appear technical on the surface, has very real consequences for ordinary people. I call on the Minister to make a statement on the need to move towards a more universal system where all taxable Department of Social Protection payments are automatically reported to the Revenue Commissioners. At present, our system is inconsistent. Many Department of Social Protection payments are already reported to Revenue in real time. The State pension, jobseeker's benefit, maternity benefit, and one-parent family payment are integrated into the PAYE system, allowing tax to be collected during the year in a relatively smooth and predictable way. However, that is not the full picture. There remains a category of taxable Department of Social Protection payments, often older and more specialised schemes, where this integration has not taken place. The following payments are not automatically reported: the bereaved partner's pension, the blind pension, the death benefit, the deserted wife's allowance, the deserted wife's benefit, and the disablement payment. Instead, we rely on individual receipts to declare them manually. The consequences of this are very real. Imagine a person who has worked all his or her life and is now in receipt of a modest pension alongside a smaller welfare payment, or think of someone's grandmother who receives one of these legacy supports. These people are not tax experts. They reasonably assume that if the State is paying them an income, the tax due is being handled, but then, at the end of the year, without warning, they receive a tax bill. It is not because they did anything wrong but because the system relied on them to know something that would not be obvious to most people, namely, that their particular payments were not reported automatically. That creates stress and confusion. It undermines confidence in the system. It is especially frustrating because it is entirely avoidable. There is a further dimension to this. Since many of these payments are older legacy schemes, they are, by definition, more likely to affect older and more vulnerable citizens. They are the people least equipped to navigate a complex tax system and they are the ones most exposed to its gaps, which brings me to the central point. This is the modern digital age. We have a PAYE system that operates in real time across the vast majority of incomes. Public bodies share data seamlessly. The State already has the mechanism in place, as shown by the many Department of Social Protection payments that are already integrated. Why are we not joining the dots? I have to say "Well done" to the Government for adding the carer's benefit and allowance to the automatic reporting system, but it is a bit shocking that this was only done this year. That should not be the case. If the State makes a payment and it is taxable, then it should follow, as a basic principle, that it is automatically reported to the Revenue. That should be the default systematic assumption, not something that depends on the type of scheme or when it was introduced. Instead, what we have is a patchwork system. Payments have been added here and there over time, often in response to issues as they arose, rather than designed from the outset as part of a coherent whole. To be fair, let us focus on the positives. Ireland overall has very good tax systems compared with many other countries. It is efficient, relatively simple, and operates in real time. The Revenue Commissioners are probably the best arm of the State. It is precisely because of that strength that we should be aiming higher. Where gaps exist, particularly gaps that affect ordinary people in their day-to-day lives, we should be closing them, and this is one of those gaps. Accordingly, I am asking the Minister to set out whether the Government intends to move to a universal model of automatic reporting on all taxable Department of Social Protection payments, and if not, to explain why a reform that is so practical, achievable and necessary has not yet been implemented, or if it will maybe make all these payments tax-exempt. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-23