Dr. Keith Walsh:

Yes. As Ms Walshe outlined, the valuation bands are all being increased by 75%. What that means is that if somebody's property has gone up in value, the closer the property is to a 75% increase since 1 May 2013, the less likely the person is to change bands - to increase a band and pay more tax or to decrease a band and pay less tax. That 75% is calibrated on the overall average property price increase over the past seven or eight years. As I mentioned earlier, we are trying not to weight it too heavily to reflect some of the bigger increases we have seen because of the restricted supply in the last while. If somebody is looking for a guide as to whether his or her property is going to face a higher or lower LPT bill or to stay roughly the same, the closer the person is to a 75% increase since 2013 is as good a guide as possible. One can look at the CSO property price indexes. The CSO produces about 11 property price indexes for different parts of the country, and those vary between 64% and 93% or 95%.

On the second part of the question as to whether the Revenue Commissioners can verify, we do not have a database somewhere in the background of how much everybody's property is worth. LPT would otherwise have been a much simpler exercise if we had. If we knew the values of properties, we could just tell people and that would make it much easier. We do not have that. However, it is a self-assessment tax. We have a very strong presumption of honesty on the part of the taxpayer. We believe the majority of taxpayers are doing their best to be compliant and to value their property as accurately as they can. On the types of analysis we would do to identify the very small minority of people who may have been non-compliant, there are two main checks we build into that. One is that we would do some analysis to look at properties around an individual property, looking at particular areas of the country to see if there might be a really big outlier. If it is a housing estate and most of the properties in that housing estate are valued at between €400,000 and €450,000, but there is one that has come in at €100,000, that is the type of outlier we might look at. There may well be justified reasons for that type of outlier. Perhaps it is a smaller property, it might be at the end of the road or whatever. Our compliance approach in those types of cases is that we engage with the property owner, ask how he or she valued the house, why he or she valued the house at that level and then take it from there.

The other check we have in the background is through the stamp duty system. If a property sells, we will get the value of the property at the time it sells. Let us say a property is valued for LPT on 1 November this year at, for example, €200,000 and then it sells a year hence for €400,000 or €500,000. We accept that within a certain margin property prices are probably going to increase over the next while, but if a property went up by a huge amount in a short space of time, that might be indicative that it might have been undervalued for the purposes of LPT. Again, however, in that situation our approach would be to ask the property owner for the basis of the value. We would very much rely on that assumption that people are being honest and making their best efforts to value their tax, but we have options there in respect of compliance.