Ms Josephine Feehily:

Obviously additional staff will be working in different places, but we are locating the administrative centre in Ennis, County Clare. Staff were becoming free in Ennis as a result of public sector reform initiatives with payroll and a number of other shared service initiatives. We would have had to redeploy these people and it made much more sense to move the work to this area. The paperwork will be done in Ennis, the planning will be done in Dublin. Obviously there is a big overlay on the IT side and the Office of the Collector General in Limerick will be central to that, as they will be collecting the money.

There is a live online system. I looked at the prototype last week. The screens are available and the system is nearly ready. The logistics are on track. Staff who will be redeployed from other Departments will come this week or next week. I have lost track of the dates. We will be hiring some temporary clerical staff in Ennis and in Limerick to supplement the staff there.

We sought an allocation of 100 staff as this is a new tax. We had no idea of what staff it will take, but now it will certainly not stop at 100. We must deal with 1.6 million tax returns and we have never handled that large volume in a single month. This is colossal and it will eat into our own resources. We will be supplementing it.

The allocation in the expenditure report for 2013 for property tax is €25.9 million.