Mr. Brendan Bruen:

I can speak to a number of them. As Mr. McMeel mentioned, the international co-operation piece is vital. The EU recently adopted the asset recovery and confiscation directive. That directive, which is very heavily influenced by Irish legislation, adopted a model of confiscation of unexplained wealth for the first time on an EU-wide basis. That is likely to significantly change the attitudes of other jurisdictions to international co-operation and enforcement of orders. For the first time, all European countries will have a model that is much closer to a CAB model. It is not necessarily a civil model or a criminal model. There is space for jurisdictions to go at it in different ways. It will significantly improve the familiarity of those jurisdictions in terms of how they implement that.

One of the biggest questions that we did not address in the scheme was how to improve the international co-operation position. We did not address it because we wanted to see what would happen with asset recovery and confiscation. There is work to be done. On foot of the directive to which I referred, negotiations are likely to start at Council of Europe level towards an additional protocol to the Warsaw Convention 2005, again to facilitate international co-operation. Insofar as the directive was adopted on 12 April, it is hot off the presses. We are tracking those negotiations and seeing what can be done with it.

There are some other areas of work which cross over not just with CAB but with other work, particularly in the police powers area, in terms of attendance at interviews, handling legal professional privilege and where such privilege is asserted. We have been in discussion with Revenue colleagues on the specific issue of the publication of tax defaulters and where that currently applies with Revenue by default but does not necessarily apply by default in the case of CAB. We are also working through a number of slightly less significant areas in that regard.

This scheme is an incremental improvement identifying particular practical pain points and trying to address each one as it goes. We have the recognition that the international co-operation piece is vital.