Mr. Derek Moran:

Those engagements between the large cases division and the companies tend to identify those sorts of negatives much more easily than the positives. They know there is an event coming up and can identify that but there are the one-offs.

All taxes are, to a greater or lesser extent, cyclical. They move with the economy. Corporation tax has the additional problem of accounting peculiarities, the carrying of losses, exhausting those losses and going from paying no tax to paying a sizeable amount of tax fairly quickly. If one considered the contribution of corporation tax to total taxes over a prolonged period, one would expect it to leap outside that boundary. Generally speaking, corporation tax has been contributing between 11% and 16% of total taxes since the start of this century. We estimate this year it will contribute 15.5%. It is within those bounds which give an aggregate level assurance.