Mr. Niall Cody:

We will have a system where one can say that in a particular area there is a property that is, for example, four bands lower than the average in the area. There can be absolutely valid reasons for that. I remember being shown the pilot of this project, where it was being mapped and we were looking at an area in south Dublin where there was one property that was, say, six bands below the value of the street. When we focused in on it, we found it was a mews house in the back garden of one of the houses, totally out of proportion with all the rest and the difference was perfectly reasonable.

We have been busy with the register, with payments and with collecting the money that people are declaring. Our work on valuations and reviewing valuations has three bases. The first is property sales. Where property sales arise, part of the clearance system is seeing whether it sold for a hell of a lot more than the person declared it. It was interesting in 2013, where people put properties on the market with an asking price that was double the band they declared on 1 May. They probably had not thought they were going to sell the house in a couple of months. There is a process for that. We also provided a facility in the LPT system to allow people to revalue their band. There are nearly 8,000 valuations up since it started. We are now looking at setting up a compliance valuation team to look at the outliers. We will do it like we do everything else. We will ask people whether they are happy with their valuation. There are all sorts of valid reasons, such as the state of the house and so on. However, there is no doubt that some of them have a problem. We would see it in the context of, leaving out the local authorities, housing bodies and so on, the 1.65 million ordinary residential properties.

The level of undervaluation is actually really low. People really tried. Overall, I think something like 85% of properties are in the first four bands. The average prices for rural Ireland were in the paper the other day. They are mostly in bands 1 and 2. It will take a fairly significant house to move it up by €50,000 or to the next band. The challenge in urban areas is clearly different. One of the other factors is that 1 May 2013 was probably very close to being the bottom of the market in Dublin.

Probably the first sign that property prices in parts of Dublin were starting at least to stop dropping was in July 2013. Another feature that I and everyone can see in parts of Dublin is that a house may sell for a price that is four bands higher than the value on 1 May 2013, and this is not a sign of non-compliance. When my predecessor appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts and was asked about the procedure when someone sells his or her house for a sum four bands above what he or she valued it, she said good luck to them. That is the reality.

We will continue to work at obvious under-declarations but we are fairly satisfied there is no significant evidence of it. The patterns of value tie in with the work that the original Thornhill group and the ESRI group had done. If one thinks one's house is in the band between €95,000 and €105,000 and declares it for the LPT at €95,000, I do not think anyone could argue with that.