Call for government to seek fresh legal advice on ‘unconstitutional’ PUP tax

Free Legal Advice Centre hopes ‘common sense’ prevails and plan to tax Pandemic Unemployment Payment is scrapped

Heather Humphreys, the social protection minister, said it had always been clear that the payment would be treated as income, and therefore taxable. Picture: Rollingnews.ie

The Free Legal Advice Centre has called on the Government to seek fresh legal advice on what it has warned could be “unconstitutional” moves to tax the Pandemic Unemployment Payment.

More than 220,000 recipients of the emergency support measure, introduced to help those laid off as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, have in recent weeks been informed that they have an outstanding tax bill to be settled with Revenue over the coming years.

The ...