Mr. Niall Cody:

I am smiling because I am tempted to say I do not know because it is nearly too early to say. I do know that we have paid out in excess of €3.6 billion between both schemes. The TWSS was before the Dáil on 26 March, the Seanad on 27 March and signed into law on 27 March by the President. On 27 March, we paid out our first amounts under TWSS. If this was normal times and we were asked to do something like this in our area of competence, we would probably say that it would take from the budget timeframe of early October to January 12 months, or 15 months, to develop a system like it.

I was talking to the person who was trying to draft the legislation on the Sunday night before it was brought before the Dáil. We were chatting and he was telling me how he proposed to draft it and I said to him that there were no final decisions at that point by Government because the Cabinet was meeting on the Monday or the Tuesday. We implemented a scheme that was complex. I had intended to use the phrase "in jig time" in my opening remarks but my board colleagues would not let me use it. I think it has been exceptional. The system, because of the investment in PAYE modernisation, was the basis on which we could do. We developed PAYE modernisation, which, to me, is one of our biggest achievements over the past ten years, but we had no idea when we were developing it what it would be used for. It is important to recognise all of the work that was done by the software developers association. We need them to engage with us to have the systems engaging. From our perspective, it has worked really well.

We have a tail to TWSS. I mentioned that we made mistakes. Some were mistakes we knew we were making. At the introduction, the transition phase of TWSS from 26 March to 4 May, we paid out €410, which was the maximum, to each employee even though we knew all of them were not entitled to the full amount. The choice was about getting the money paid out to employers or waiting until we had the full system developed. We decided, in conjunction with the Department of Finance and the Minister, that it was more important that we got money to the employers when they were facing what they were facing. Now, we are in a process of reconciliation, in respect of which Mr. Boyle is chairing a working group. I imagine at times when he is at lengthy meetings about this, he thinks that was a terrible mistake and that we should have paid €300 and we would have a lot less reconciliation to do. We made conscious decisions. I sometimes think that we forget what it was like on 12, 13 and 14 March. We really did not know what was going to happen. We did not know what businesses would be able to do. I mentioned in my opening remarks that we made mistakes. For the most part, that is aimed at the Comptroller and Auditor General whose team is already in examining all of the mistakes we made in TWSS and EWSS but they were made for the right reasons. We will get through them.

The system has worked really well. Our investment in real time has been worthwhile in terms of how we administer the tax system. I was taken by the committee's press release that it was going to look at efficiencies in how we operate our business.

What has been shown is that real-time systems are the new way forward, integrating our systems with business and moving away from tax returns that are made to comply with our requirements. The PAYE system is integrated with normal payroll, for example.