Ms Josephine Feehily:

There is no question but that we are "out-lawyered". We have lost between 800 and 900 people through various departure mechanisms in the past few years and will be losing another couple of hundred this year. We have made it an absolute priority, to the extent that we obtain sanction to fill these posts, to target the gaps in skills. The Vice Chairman mentioned the large cases division, in particular; we specifically went to the market to recruit principal officers with detailed tax technical qualifications and placed them in the large cases division. They all came from the private sector. We also hired at assistant principal officer level for the large cases division. In the past few months we have hired staff at principal officer level to deal with complex corporate tax issues. We will never have enough staff, but to the extent that we have an opportunity to fill the gaps, we are focusing on skills to a very great extent and will continue to do so, wherever we can.