ICOB (Increased cost of business) Grant - so easy

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peemac

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Increased Cost of Business Grant - Budget 2024.

Surprised at the low take up reported and only 3 days before it ends (might be extended)

It gives 50% of your 2023 rates back up to a maximum of €5,000 if your commercial rates are under €30,000.

All you need to apply are your rates account number, vat number and bank details and have your rates up to date (or a payment plan in place)

https://www.mycoco.ie/icob

I applied late March, payment arrived last week. Took about 3 minutes to complete the form.
 
Business owners are suspicious of this, but i believe they shouldn't be.

Their suspicion is fully understandable given the abysmal treatment of some of those who applied for support under the original Covid TWSS.

It will be a long time before those businesses trust any new support initiative from the State - especially those which kept on staff during the lockdowns, taking on trust Revenue boss Niall Cody's plea that they had "a patriotic duty" to use the TWSS to enable them do so, only to later be forced to repay it all having retrospectively deemed to have failed to meet the qualifying conditions.

These businesses ended up enduring massive disruption to their operations, and later inflation in their costs, all while shouldering full wages overhead for that period and receiving no State support.

Many of them have since gone under and the government literally struggles to give money away.

This scheme is rubbish anyway - it would have been more honest to cut rates for qualifying businesses than having them struggle to pay it to local authorities and then have half of it refunded by central government.
 
Do you have to have the 2024 rates paid to get the Grant?
 

Wasn't the proportion of businesses that had TWSS clawed back, something like 3% of all claimant businesses? Included within that number will be the inevitable (human nature being what it is) opportunistic claims by people who just couldn't turn down an offer of cash flow - I'm actually quite surprised at how high the compliance rate, as reported, is.

A clawback rate like that hardly smacks of obtuseness or underhanded tactics by the body tasked with administering the scheme... What ought they have done, in your view, just turn a blind eye?
 
I stand by my criticisms of the how the TWSS was operated by Revenue. The condition that a firm was disqualified totally if its decrease in sales value during a certain period did not reach a certain quantum (25% iirc) was a crude measure that hit non-food/tech/health sector small manufacturers in particular. Its practical application was scandalous.

I saw cases of firms which panicked in the early stages of the first lockdown - hard to blame them when the State told them to panic - and sold off all the stock they could for fear of being left with it had they held back. A few months down the road, these firms struggled to replenish new stocks as production was decimated by the supply shortages that accompanied the lockdowns. Some of those firms have never recovered from the resulting disruption and there are now question marks over the future viability of many of them.

And then those crisis-hit firms were then hit by having to repay the State support that they had been promised, because their initial flush of sales in the first 3:months disqualified them. The fact the their production was disrupted or ruined altogether for months on end was deemed irrelevant.

And yet Revenue literally refused to listen to the pleas from myself and many others. "The rules is the rules" is fine when you're policing tax compliance but in this case it was an unnecessarily crude and destructive position.

I'm not surprised by your figure of 3% for the percentage of claimants ultimately forced to repay TWSS. My guess is that the proportion of non-food/tech/health sector small manufacturers within the economy is a subset of that figure. Indigenous small manufacturers in particular have dwindled significantly in recent decades mainly due to official neglect and their numbers are considerably fewer than a few decades ago. Obviously when your numbers end up within a statistical margin of error in terms of the whole economy, the neglect that caused that decline in the first instance will become even sharper, as instanced in this case.

What should Revenue have done? That's for them and their political masters (add appropriate sarcasm emoji here) to decide, but not having their Chair go onto the national airwaves to emotionally blackmail productive sector firms to participate in a scheme that was ridiculously unsuitable for their specific circumstances in the face of the lockdown hysteria would have been a better start.

It will take time, the full unwinding of debt warehousing, and probably an eventual recession for the scale of this folly to dawn, but history will not be kind to those who engineered or facilitated it. Nor should it be.
 
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For clarity, if a business has more than one premises the grant applies to the Rates paid on each unit, not the total paid by the business.
 

It must be nice to be able sit in judgement, taking a position of "I don't know / won't say what they should've done, but they definitely shouldn't have done that", where it's for others to decide emergency measures / policies during the most uncertain of times, and for you to scathe unstintingly...

It's no more than your opinion that history will not be kind to the policymakers of the Covid era; you're fully entitled to it, but it is simply that, an opinion.
 

I'll both judge and highlight serious errors and inconsistent positions as I see them, but thanks all the same for the lecture.

Niall Cody was Chair of the Revenue when he made his "your patriotic duty" statement on RTE radio in March/April 2020 and he was still in that position less than a year later when Revenue officers started adopting their "the rules is the rules" stance against small manufacturers who took him at his original word.

Shameful stuff.
 
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