Mr. Niall Cody:

No. There was a higher figure than normal up to March 2017. I was looking at it and the biggest proportion of it related to liquidations of companies in the property development and construction area arising from the collapse of the building industry. Sometimes these liquidations take that length of time. Some of them were unfortunately cases that had gone through a whole legal process of appeal, in which Revenue won at every level of appeal. When these cases were settled the companies went into liquidation, leaving substantial debts. That is one of the reasons we would be very keen to make the appeals process much speedier. Some cases enter the appeals process partly as a strategy to ensure that those involved do not end up paying the money at all. In the last figures the amount written off had decreased to €147 million. That reflects the recovering economy, but even in a recovering economy businesses will run into difficulty through no fault of the business itself. Business failure is not all down to people engaging in sharp practice. It is an inevitable part of the business cycle. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we are really keen to improve the timeliness of compliance in order to prevent moneys owed becoming debt. On that increase in timeliness, our large cases have a 90% compliance rate in the month following the date of payment. Compliance in medium-sized cases, which is to say cases involving a tax liability of €200,000 to €500,000, is now up to 98%. Compliance in cases involving total liabilities of less than €200,000 has increased from 81% in 2009 to 89%. I would be really interested in having a target to improve that to approximately 95% over the next three years. The Collector General will not like me giving that figure.