Ms Josephine Feehily:

I guess we were also chosen because we have 90 years of experience of administering taxes and, since 1988, 30-something years of administering self-assessed taxes, which the Local Government Management Agency did not have. Self-assessed tax is quite different from the old-fashioned idea whereby we write out to people telling the amount and then they pay. Self-assessed tax requires a strong element of service to support voluntary compliance and a strong element of deterrent. These are the characteristics and we have 30-something years experience of self-assessed taxes. VAT is a self-assessed tax and consequently, I would say that our experience in tax administration generally and in particular in respect of a self-assessed environment probably was one of the factors.