Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 March 2015

Public Accounts Committee

2013 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Dublin Docklands Development Authority: Annual Report and Financial Statements

10:00 am

Mr. John Crawley:

The second item is slightly easier to answer. The €327,000 write-off related to a debt where, unfortunately, the counter-party went bust. There may have been two parties. The €5 million figure related to provisions made by the authority in previous years in respect of development contribution levies that had been billed on developers in the area who were not paying those levies. Those levies became of concern to previous boards and they marked a bad debt provision against those debts. We subsequently negotiated to have those debts recovered, which we are now doing. Therefore, we were in a position to write that provision back. In other words, we no longer needed a bad debt provision and we are now able to secure the collection of those debts.