Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 25 June 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

The Benefits of e-Conveyancing: Discussion

12:45 pm

Mr. Peter McHugh:

There might be an element of confusion in that as well. The 2 million land parcels represent 2 million registered titles. Of the 2.8 million parcels that have been digitised, some of the 2 million titles would have more than one land parcel. That is what makes up the 2.8 million.

I wish to refer back to the issue of possible fraud, security and hacking. We put a number of measures in place in our electronic discharges project. A fraudulent discharge was a good opportunity for potential fraud because somebody could either remortgage and abscond or sell the property free of mortgage, and the lender would not know until a couple of months later when it realised the mortgage was in arrears. Under the electronic discharge, we built in internal processes within the bank and there is also instant notification to the bank when that charge is removed, so it would flag it immediately that there was an issue there. We also have all the proper monitoring and security systems in place on top of that.