Mr. Pat McLoughlin:

We produced a report on local authority rates collection in April 2016 that related to the performance between 2013 and 2014. Each year, it is one of the indicators we have. At that stage our view was that a lot of additional income could be collected by the sharing of good practice. The 2015 report indicates that collection performance was 80% or more for 16 local authorities and that Fingal, Kilkenny and Roscommon councils were exceeding 90%. We looked at the overall issue of the system itself to see whether we could add value by further examining how the rates system operated. We took a view that so many reports, etc., on it had been done at that stage that with our small staff we could not add value to reconsidering the whole rates system.