Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 February 2014

Public Accounts Committee

2012 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 9 - Office of the Revenue Commissioners
Chapter 23 - Revenue Collection
Chapter 24 - Management of Revenue Debt
Chapter 25 - Taxpayer Compliance
Chapter 26 - Corporation Tax Losses
Chapter 27 - Tax Audit Settlements

12:40 pm

Ms Josephine Feehily:

Yes, we were given a perfectly adequate budget; the issue was human resources. We were given an additional 100 staff. It has soaked up quite a bit more than that. I am not very surprised about that as 100 was always too few. However, we took it, and it has impacted on some of our other areas, not, hopefully, in a terminal way. I hope we will be able to rectify that in the course of the first half of this year. We had to accept an impact because it was such a major change for us and for property owners. The bigger problem for us is that we remain subject to the employment control framework, so while we were given an additional 100 staff, our headcount number overall had to decrease. It has been eaten up and in the course of this year we will be back where we started.