Mr. Eugene Creighton:

I thank the Deputy for the question. As this is my first opportunity to intervene, I open by saying on behalf of Revenue that we sincerely apologise for and regret the errors identified in our administration of the collection of and accounting for the insurance compensation fund contributions. Those errors have now been fixed. They arose because of a change we made to our payments system back in 2016. The IT changes were made with the best of intentions and were designed to improve the tax payment system for taxpayers by introducing an electronic payments platform, known as RevPay. This platform applied to about 30 taxes and duties. These were previously paid by way of cheque and electronic fund transfer, EFT.

Unfortunately, the IT changes made in introducing RevPay adversely affected the way the contributions to the insurance compensation fund were accounted for. The contributions paid under the new RevPay system were incorrectly allocated to the Exchequer as part of the receipts for the insurance stamp duty levies instead of being paid to the Central Bank of Ireland for inclusion in the insurance compensation fund. It was €33 million that was misallocated over the three-year period. The Revenue has now fixed the IT errors and has introduced for the stamp duty levies and the insurance compensation fund contributions a new and much improved pay-and-file system, which will ensure that a similar situation will not reoccur and that the system will account for the payments and the filing of returns in real time. This will mean there will not be a historical build-up of a misallocation of funds.