THERE’S SOME VERY welcome news for those who own their own business and the self-employed today with the government launching a major new tax rebate scheme.
The scheme, known as ‘StartUp Refunds for Entrepreneurs’ (SURE) will allow entrepreneurs to reclaim up to 41% of capital they have personally invested in their business.
SURE is essentially a rebrand of the state’s Seed Capital Scheme, the blurb surrounding which tended to be a bit impenetrable for most business owners.
In making the scheme more accessible, the government is showing a slightly more savvy approach to encouraging take-up, with harsh lessons learned perhaps from the lack of use of, say, mortgage arrears schemes.
SURE itself essentially works as an income tax refund and is primarily aimed at encouraging people, such as the retired or the unemployed, to start their own business.
“In Ireland we have great start-ups, we just don’t have enough of them,” said Jobs minister Richard Bruton at the SURE launch.
We are determined to ensure that as many people as possible are aware of this scheme so that more people start businesses and help create the jobs we need.
Mark Fielding, CEO of ISME (Irish Small and Medium Enterprise association) says the scheme is “definitely an improvement” on what has gone before.
The fact that the self-employed are treated on an inequal basis when it comes to welfare payments and tax is a particular bugbear of Ireland’s small firms’ representatives.
“It (the SURE scheme) is an improvement, I can’t say differently than that, and it’s something we’ve lobbied for,” Fielding told TheJournal.ie.
It’s essentially a rebranding of what went before, but that’s no bad thing. Nobody could understand what was there before, you’d have needed a degree in linguistics to get through it.
We will certainly be promoting this. The powers that be are becoming more savvy in their promotion of these schemes, and without that extra push it’s hard to get things done.
Fielding says small firm owners need all the help they can get at present.
Small businesses in Ireland depend more on bank finance than do our cousins across Europe. The average is probably 60% of funding here, and 30% in Europe.
So any scheme that helps is welcome.
Applications can be made for the SURE scheme here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say