Mr. Keith Walsh:

The answer is "Yes". As I mentioned in my opening remarks, in the last few years we have published more and more information. Probably most significantly, we publish a ready reckoner and we update it in the run-up to the budget. That ready reckoner shows a series of tax policy options, including the impact of increasing or decreasing universal social charge, USC, rates, and the impact of changing value added tax, VAT, rates. It is pretty much those sorts of changes to rates, bands and thresholds for all of the major taxes. We publish that on our website and it is available to everyone, including the Department of Finance. Aside from that, we interact with the Department. Sometimes in the run-up to the budget Department officials will simply look at the ready reckoner and will use the figures there. Sometimes they will want clarifications or figures that are not exactly covered by the ready reckoner or they might want something to be refined or confirmed. It is a little difficult to give a general answer, but we certainly have ongoing interactions with the Department of Finance on budgetary matters. That starts well before the summer, before the tax strategy group papers, and continues all the way through the budget process into the Finance Bill.

I will now address the commercial stamp duty or non-residential property stamp duty change in the budget. The increase provided for in the budget, from 2% to 6%, was shown in our ready reckoner. The figure projected there, a €376 million increase, was taken by the Department of Finance and accounted for in the budget.

I will explain where that figure comes from. When we are trying to project stamp duty, there are three phases to our work. First, we look back at the most recent year for which we have complete data, in this case it is 2016. We look at 2016 to try to get an idea of the general taxable base during that year. We try to factor out once-off revenues, because if they are once-off in nature they are not a good indicator for receipts in future years. In 2016 in particular, we factored out a number of very significant once-off payments that inflated the tax base. If we had not factored them out, we would have had a higher estimate for commercial stamp duty.

Looking at 2016 data is the first phase. Then we look at 2017 data. We try to see if the trends that we expected from 2016 have continued, and if there are changes we should be aware of. Lastly, we look at the growth prospects based on the Department of Finance forecasts for 2018. Based on that assessment of data from 2016, trends since then in 2017 and expectations for 2018, we formed a view that the taxable base for non-residential property for stamp duty purposes was around €9 billion in the last several years. The consistent or stable tax base is about that, and we think that will reoccur next year. That is essentially the basis for the costing of the increase from 2% to 6%.