Mr. Niall Cody:

We gave our response to the recommendations of the Comptroller and Auditor General at the time and we have given him an update in the material last week. We have done considerable work on the unfinished housing estates. In excess of 4,900 unfinished housing estate exemption claims have been received. Of that, at this stage, 1,800 cases have been reviewed and contact has been made where there was doubt over entitlement to the exemption. Approximately 600 cases have had the exemption claim refused. The findings of the exemption team indicate that in mixed estates, where the delineation between exempt and non-exempt properties is unclear, up to 40% of the claims submitted were invalid. However, apart from mixed estates, there is no evidence of the submission of invalid claims for the unfinished housing estate exemption.

It is important to outline some of the background regarding the unfinished estates. Obviously, it was a very emotional issue. The household charge provision had an exemption for unfinished estates. It covered just under 50,000 properties. By the time LPT was introduced the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, who controls the prescription of the unfinished estate, had work done from 2011 to 2013. The unfinished housing estate for LPT covers approximately 5,100 houses as opposed to the almost 50,000 houses covered by the household charge exemption. What happened was that there were estates where partial work had been done in the meantime and one had an estate which, for the household charge, was unfinished in its entirety but by the time the 2013 regulations were made the element of the estate that was finished was taken out of the unfinished estate. That is where we talk about the mixed estates. Somebody who was in an estate that was exempt from household charge may not have been exempt for LPT. The errors we found were in that.

We are quite satisfied that they were mostly unintentional. I remember looking at this back in 2013. Some of them had filed their LPT return claiming the exemption before the revised regulations were enacted, so they thought they were exempt. It is also probably fair to say that a number of them felt that they should have been exempt, regardless of the regulations, and claimed it. It is a really sensitive area. If one is in an estate that is reclassified as finished while some of it is still unfinished, there is no doubt it has significant impact on the valuation band.

Generally what happens, particularly in rural towns, is that the property becomes liable in band 1. We have not written out what we would call enforcement letters. Often, we contact them by phone call to say that as far we can see, they are on the wrong side of the line and to ask them to have a look at it and resubmit. Those phone calls can be very difficult and there can be a number of contacts. We are working through the exemptions. The one thing we can safely say is that we do not see any evidence that people have set out to claim the exemption. Overall, the exemptions cover about 50,000 houses. It would not be where one would start. Regarding the amount of money that is at risk for many people, ignoring the local authority variation, most of them will be in band 1, for which the LPT liability is €90. We want to get it right and get them into a position going forward. Yesterday on the radio there was some commentary on the considerable work that is now being done on unfinished estates and one of the issues for the Thornhill review will be what comes out of that exemption.