Comment: Recently the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, Mr Frank Daly, surprised members of the Dáil Finance and Public Services Committee when he confessed he could only give tentative figures for the cost of most tax breaks and allowances.

These are the tax incentives which allowed a fortunate 41 tax payers in 2001 to pay no tax at all on declared incomes in excess of €500,000 for that year.

Two items caused real shocks to the committee.

One was that the most recent figures that could be supplied were for 2001. The other was the total absence of useful information on the impact of many specific reliefs, some quite notorious.

The only data Mr Daly could supply to the committee was limited information on capital allowances, BES schemes and investments in pensions.

He could offer no concrete information to the committee on a further 33 reliefs including exemptions in respect of stallion stud fees, tax incentives associated with multi-storey car parks, holiday cottages and private sports injury clinics and private nursing homes.

For these particular items there is as yet no data available at all.

You can imagine how the CEO of a company would be dealt with if he or she were to base decision making on records which were three years out of date, or if they confessed there was no information to hand at all on certain critical issues.

Yet this is what the Minister and the Department of Finance ask the Dáil to do every year. Sections are incorporated into the Finance Act and TDs and the public are asked to take on trust a glut of reliefs and schemes without any notion of who they will benefit and what will be the cost of the tax foregone.

In one quite shameful incident a significant shelter was established through an amendment to the Finance Bill in the final five minutes of its allotted time in the Dáil.

I suggest it is time to bring some rationality to this tax-making process. I am proposing the establishment of a Standing Tax Reform Commission as an expert mechanism for review and a clearing house for public debate on taxation policy.

My proposal would see the establishment of a tax reform commission as a focal point of active public dialogue and dedicated research on taxation.

Such a body would have a statutory right to receive and to commission timely information on the operation of the tax code, in particular the cost of the various schemes and allowances which form the basis of tax avoidance by the very wealthy in Irish society.

The commission would be chaired by an independent person, with senior Department of Finance and Revenue officials available to the commission on a continuous basis.

The commission would receive and debate submissions from political parties and interest groups on tax policy in general, and on proposals for any new reliefs and the commission would bring into the public domain the work of the informal Tax Strategy Committee which has been operating for some 10 years now within the Department of Finance.

The Tax Strategy Group is highly influential within Government and social partnership structures. Yet the bulk of its debate takes place behind closed doors without detailed costings ever being made available to the Dáil, let alone the public.

Labour's tax reform commission would sponsor policy discussion on critical features of our system, including:

As Labour spokesperson on Finance since 2002, I have witnessed each year organisations such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul make detailed recommendations to the Minister on measures to relieve poverty and help people on low pay.

Such submissions are worthy, well researched and well presented, yet quite frankly the bulk of them go nowhere.

Compare the fate of these submissions to that of the doctor in Mr McCreevy's constituency who apparently made a brief but successful submission seeking tax relief for private clinics, or last year the representations from the hotel industry which argued for additional tax breaks for refurbishing hotels.

Both these brief submissions caught the attention of the then minister for finance and as if by magic they were in the Finance Act, without any kind of cost benefit analysis other than the minister's hunch that these tax breaks were appropriate.

Despite low normal rates of taxation in Ireland, our tax base is becoming further and further distorted by special allowances and tax avoidance mechanisms which benefit a select set of mostly wealthy people.

The argument by Fianna Fáil and the PDs is that these incentives are essential to economic prosperity. If that is the case, why has this Government been so reluctant to hold them up to the light of detailed public scrutiny and cost benefit analysis.

Joan Burton TD is finance spokesperson for the Labour Party