Mr. Seamus Coffey:

When the CSO produced the first round of GDP figures and national accounts for 2015, they were based on provisional information but a couple of months later it had a better picture of what happened and the figures changed dramatically. Providing preliminary figures might be useful but unless they actually reflect what is happening, they might not be entirely helpful. Revenue only has figures for the tax paid when preliminary tax returns come in. It might be able to infer profits from that but cannot, for example, infer the trade charges, the figure for which has grown substantially over the past number of years. The trade charges figure is not relevant to the European investigation because it relates to expenditure - it relates to companies buying a service. If a technology is developed somewhere else, companies have to pay for it. In the case of Apple, there are not separate entities so it is not comparable to most companies in this respect. It is comparable in how it operates, however, and the question is not whether the double Irish is still operating. The question is whether companies in Ireland are still paying for technologies developed elsewhere and the answer to that is "yes".