Mr. Niall Cody:

No meeting goes without being on mute and talking to yourself for some of it. I am going to pass the Brexit ball to Mr. Harrahill again, but before I do I will give some idea of the scale. Mr. Harrahill and I appeared before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach in the run-up to Brexit and we were talking then about the fact that we used to handle 1.8 million customs entries before Brexit. We had anticipated that we would have to scale up to handle something like 20 million customs entries in the first year post-Brexit, which would have been a ten-fold increase, by and large. The reality is that this year we are probably looking at a 30-fold increase in customs entries.

We examine aspects such as the local property tax and pay and file tax returns and scale. Our chief information officer, CIO, rang me the other day in that context, just after the pay and file tax returns deadline. We spend our time in the context of that pay and file process looking at our systems and ensuring that they are robust and working. Our CIO told me when he rang on that occasion that we had handled 350,000 customs entries, and that that was the highest level of entries we had on one day. Mr. Harrahill and I were chatting about this subject yesterday, and since then we have handled something like 700,000 customs entries in one day. This increase has been driven by several factors. The impact of Covid-19 has been massive on e-commerce. In addition, the EU rules concerning postal, VAT and customs' rates changed on 1 July, and that has presented significant challenges around low-value items. Therefore, the scale of customs operations is massive. I will pass over to Mr. Harrahill to add a bit of colour to this point.