Ms Josephine Feehily:

Let us start again. What I indicated to the Chair, or at least I felt I had indicated, was that I have serious concerns that such a process would bring us into conflict with the Data Protection Act, based on our understanding of that Act and the code of practice we have agreed with the Data Protection Commissioner. I definitely indicated that Revenue, at this point, is not comfortable with retaining credit and debit card details. This refers back to Deputy Farrell's question, which I did not answer earlier. The security issue I was referring to was the security of the information. It is quite a serious issue and would require us to move into a whole different line of business if we started to hold on to debit and credit card details. It presents risks of data loss way beyond any of the risks we have to cope with at present. It presents risks that cardholders could find attempted fraud on their credit or debit card accounts and we already experienced that - although it did not succeed - last May. That is the kind of security risk I am talking about. We are not set up for it. There is definitely a question as to whether it would bring us into conflict with section 2 of the Data Protection Act, which deals with the retention and use of data, in particular, unnecessary retention and use.