Mr. Tom O'Mahony:

The point is that the system did spot it. It is our work that the Comptroller and Auditor General's report is on. Now that we have electronic monitoring of who travels on the M50, we are in a position to carry out this kind of survey. We can get the registration numbers of cars which are on the road and check those against the numbers in the national vehicle and driver file to establish whether they are taxed. Our suspicion was that the evasion rate would prove to be about 5%, based on the experience in countries which have had the system we currently have. Under the current system, it is open to a person to attend a local Garda station and make a declaration to the effect that his or her car has been off the road for a particular period of time. A garda must witness that declaration but, of course, has no way to verify it. It is an obvious gap in the system and there are a great many people who exploit it. We carried out the surveys and they showed that there is an evasion rate of approximately 5%.

In the UK when they changed from a system under which one could make this type of declaration to a continuous licensing system under which the car must be continuously taxed the evasion rate dropped to below 0.7% or 0.8%. We expect that the same would happen here. The Government has agreed to close this loophole and the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is preparing the legislation because the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government is responsible for motor tax legislation. I understand that will come before the Oireachtas in the next couple of months and will change the system so that one must make the declaration in advance. If one has declared that one's car is off the road for three months and it is spotted on the road then one is in trouble.