Mr. Niall Cody:

The debt warehousing initiative was introduced in the July stimulus package back in 2020. At the time, the Department of Finance was engaging with us about the challenges businesses were facing. We had suspended our normal enforcement activity from 10 March. We had suspended the imposition of interest and the referral of cases to the Revenue sheriffs. We were looking at how we would manage this process in the midst of a pandemic. We proposed to the Department that the best way to do this, to give a legal framework to build a successful system, was to bring forward legislation. We came up with the concept of the debt warehouse. In the July stimulus, there was an anticipation that we were going to come out of Covid and that there was a process in which businesses would recover. Unfortunately, that has not happened. Subsequently, the debt warehousing period was extended again in the Finance Bill.

In terms of how it works, the first period is up to the end of this year. That covers VAT liabilities up and including November-December 2021 and PAYE and PRSI liabilities up to and including December 2021. They are the loss periods for the first periods of the debt warehousing. For all of 2022, for any debt in the warehouse repaid in that period there will be no interest. No interest accrues on any of the debt that is in the warehouse from March 2020 to 31 December 2021. As of 31 October, 98,000 individual customers are availing of the debt warehouse facility. At the end of October, there was €2.8 billion in total in the debt warehouse. We publish figures every month on debt warehousing. We will be publishing figures for the end of November next week.

For 2022, the debt is warehoused. Businesses have to engage with us at the end of 2022 to come up with appropriate arrangements. It is not yet set out what the maximum period will be. We will take an appropriate arrangement from each individual business having regard to its individual circumstances. The key condition - it is really important that businesses are ware of this - is that they must keep current returns to up date even if they cannot pay. We have written to the 98,000 customers in the past three weeks to remind them to file their returns. It is really important that have their returns in and up-to-date as otherwise they might fall out of the warehousing and, thus, be subject to the normal interest rates. That is really important.