Ms Josephine Feehily:

Mindful of the two minute limit, I will be brief.

The chapters under consideration are really about our core business of collection, debt management and audit and compliance. Chapter 23 which deals with tax collection, as the Comptroller and Auditor General pointed out, shows Exchequer revenue in 2012 at €36.5 billion. The figure for 2013 is €37.8 billion, some €6 billion higher than for 2010 which was the worst year in recent times.

In relation to debt management, as I have said before to the committee, the change in the amount of outstanding tax debt over time can give us some insights into the financial circumstances of taxpayers. The debt is expressed by Revenue as a performance measure by comparing it with the gross tax collected. As expected, the resulting ratio increased, from a low of 2% in 2007 to 4% in 2009. It was still at 4% in March 2013. However, I anticipate that it will show an improvement when we next measure the debt at the end of next month.

On the compliance side, as the Comptroller and Auditor General acknowledged, we have active risk based programmes. I circulated in advance to committee members our headline results for 2013. On the subject of compliance, they may also be aware that we will shortly be rolling out a structured and focused local property tax compliance programme, but before we do, we are giving property owners a final chance to avoid interest and penalties. In that context, I have also furnished for the information of the committee some LPT statistics which have just been published to coincide with this campaign.

Let me add something that is not in the paper circulated. For the committee's information, in relation to losses, in his opening remarks the Comptroller and Auditor General referred to the fact that there were restrictions on the uses of losses, which, of course, was the correct position when the report was compiled, but that is no longer the case. Since the passage of the Finance (No. 2) Act 2013, that restriction has been removed. That is a new piece of information subsequent to the publication of the report.