Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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Question 144: To ask the Minister for Finance the rationale behind the decision to register imported cars starting from the number 120,000, as there does not seem to be any reasonable administrative reason or any consumer information purpose, but it does serve to devalue imported cars; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9732/12]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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I am advised by the Revenue Commissioners that a new vehicle registration computer system was introduced in December 2011. Because of budgetary constraints, it was not possible to carry forward all the registration details of vehicles registered in the previous 19 years to the new system. Accordingly, a simplified model that did not require the details of the registration number assigned to the last vehicle registered in each of the licensing authorities in each of the previous 19 years was adopted for issuing registration numbers for prior years. The simplified model assigns registration numbers starting from a particular number for each licensing authority regardless of year. The particular number chosen had to be sufficiently high to enable additional unique registrations to be added. The starting registration number for each licensing authority was selected to ensure that there is no possibility of a vehicle being assigned a number that was previously assigned to another vehicle under the old system. Accordingly, the number will be higher than would have been assigned in the normal course of events for some years.

This is a short-term phenomenon. Vehicles presented for registration that were first registered in 2011 and subsequent years (in another State) will not be affected by this change and will be assigned the next available number in the sequence for that licensing authority and year of registration.