Ms Josephine Feehily:

Obviously, we have looked at that. The problem is that its definition is not the same as ours, or the definition in legislation. For example, it counts bed-sits but we do not. They are not liable. There were 230,000 vacant properties on census night, so one is down to enumerators making decisions about what they were and what they were not. A significant number of people classified themselves as living in a property rent free. We do not know if they are liable or someone else is the owner. I am not in any way disagreeing.

Experts differ but I have no problem accepting that the number is somewhere north of 1.9 million. It could be 1.95 million. That is our take on that issue and we have been working with the CSO to ensure that we fully understood the data it had and what did not apply to us.

To return to what I said earlier when I was discussing the numbers with Deputy McGrath, whatever the number is, we have a compliance rate of over 80%. There is no other way to look at this. Whether it is 1.9 million or 2 million, we have a very high compliance rate. For me that is really important, because we do not like - despite what people might think - to be in the enforcement business. We much prefer to be dealing with voluntary compliance. We will have a clearer picture when we get the full schedules from the local authorities and so forth and when we get whatever number of returns that are filed tonight. As I said, we have about 40,000 stock-in-trade. The Collector General has about 150,000 work items, some of which will be people who actually filed a return on the basis that they did not have a property ID on paper. So that is why I am saying I think we have another considerable proportion of that under control. I only see a risky number of approximately 100,000. That is my logic. We have 1.72 million properties on the register. We have a different 1.72 million that are voluntarily compliant. It is unfortunate that the numbers are the same, which makes it somewhat confusing. If we take the register that we have of properties that we know or think we know, and add the local authorities to that, we get to 1.88 million. Therefore the gap, no matter how one cuts it and even if the census is absolutely accurate, is not much more than the 100,000 that I mentioned.