Business Plus Annual Survey of Ireland’s Leading Tax Advisors

Our Tax Partner, Aidan Byrne, featured in the September issue of Business Plus Magazine.

Aidan offers insight into the key taxation issues of relevance to SMEs and owner-managers in the year ahead.

RSM Ireland's tax advisors specialise in advising mid-market corporate clients, many with international operations, ensuring that they are fully compliant and are efficiently structured.

 

TAX ISSUES

Our International clients are concerned by all the tax changes that are currently happening after many years of little or no change. Ensuring compliance is correctly dealt with and ensuring that their global tax strategy remains effective and sustainable, forms a large part of our engagement with those clients at the moment. This entails working with our partners around the RSM global network.

For clients with operations in Ireland, the cost of employing people is a key concern and a driver of those costs is the high level of personal taxation that individuals must pay in Ireland. Recent talk of further increases for those in the ‘squeezed middle’ does not augur well for solving this issue, which is making Ireland uncompetitive compared with other countries in the EU that compete for FDI projects.

 

BREXIT

The key concern is around supply chain and the VAT and customs consequences of Brexit, regardless of whether the UK’s exit from the European Union is hard or soft. We are advising clients to look at their business model and consider changes that they can make or consider which will mitigate against the worst-case scenario. It is more than likely that the UK will become a third country following Brexit, so preparing for that now, as against when it happens, makes good business sense. For clients with large UK sales but no UK presence, consideration needs to be given to setting up an entity there with a view to remaining in both camps.

 

TAX REFORM

The level of taxation in Ireland on labour is too high and is beginning to make Ireland uncompetitive, particularly in industries with well-paid jobs. The reliance on this and on the corporation tax payable by multinationals is not sustainable and is a real risk to Ireland’s financial wellbeing. This reality has been highlighted by many economists and reports but there does not seem to be the political will or appetite to address it.

 

As publsihed in Business Plus, September 2018