Mr. Niall Cody:

As I said in my opening statement, the nature of phased payment arrangements is that some will fall down. A couple of weeks ago, I remember saying that whatever chance a phased-payment arrangement has of being honoured, if one is not entered into, there is no chance of it being honoured. The level of engagement is really positive. We had huge engagement with trade representative groups. We conducted webinars with businesses, engaged a good deal and wrote to all these entities. We made it as simple as possible. At the time, there was much discussion about really long instalment arrangements and phased payment arrangements. The vast majority of phased payment arrangements are for five years or less. As I said to Deputy Conway-Walsh, we will publish the detail of this in the next couple of weeks. More than a third of the phased payment arrangements are for less than three years. Probably less than 5% of them are for terms in excess of five years, which is really positive. I would be very confident that a significant proportion of those will be honoured.

The really positive aspect of phased payment arrangements, which we will be monitoring, is that the current liabilities are paid as they fall due. That will be the flag. If an entity is struggling to pay its current VAT or current payroll taxes, that will be the warning flag and we monitor that closely. If it is the case that there is some temporary arrangement which would mean if we suspended the phased payment arrangement for three months to allow the entity to pay its current liabilities, that flexibility will be there. While it may have entered into an arrangement for three years, it will be much better if it takes three and a half years to clear it and the business remains viable and employment is maintained. Our basic responsibility is to collect the tax that is due but ongoing viability of entities is in all our interests. I am positive that this actually is a measure that can improve the timeliness of compliance of small businesses and that we will get into a pattern where the dates laid down by the Oireachtas for people to meet will be treated not as something to start thinking about when they have passed but as dates they actually meet. We see the warehouse as one of the agents to drive that change for some businesses.