Mr. Niall Cody:

The vast majority of repayments are dealt with in a five-day period. Similarly, the Cathaoirleach talked about phone lines and public offices, but the great change has been in the way the PAYE system works since this modernisation came about. Before this modernisation, a relatively small proportion of PAYE taxpayers filed a tax return. Now, because it is all prepopulated and online, at the start of January every year we give people a preliminary end-of-year statement. These are available online. People can look them up and the statements show whether we think people owe us money or we owe them money. To finalise the process, people go online and do their online returns.

Already this year, we have received more than 1 million PAYE returns. Last year, I think it was 1.2 million returns. I remember when these returns amounted to less than 100,000. The statements are now prepopulated and the repayments, if they happen, are usually in people's bank accounts within five working days. A selection of these statements, though, are checked. The only reason, therefore, why there might be a delay is if a return were to be selected for checking. This might be for whatever reason.

Regarding the phone lines, in April 2024, those members of staff on our PAYE phones answered 65,000 calls. In April 2023, this figure was 43,000. There has been a big increase. The challenge around operating the phone lines for the full day is that if we try to do it for the whole day the knock-on impact would be on correspondence. In the year to date, we have received 469,272 items of correspondence on PAYE matters. This has been the number just in the first four months of the year. We closed 452,000 of those queries in that same period. What we have to try to do is to balance providing the phone service with dealing with correspondence. If we were not to deal with the correspondence, we would end up having phone calls asking where the reply was to the correspondence.