Ms Davena Lyons:

I will cover that off. As I mentioned earlier, and I am not sure the Senator was in the room, the claim comes in on the Revenue online system. It has supporting documentation and potentially a detailed description of what it is. We have a risk assessment process built into the programme, as we do in respect of any other claim that comes into us across any of our taxes. If the risk assessment process identifies that claim for review, a Revenue staff member will look at it. This is where we start to process such claims. Based on the supporting documentation submitted, we may be able to validate the claim and say that we are happy enough with it to let it out the door.

What we need to do sometimes is to contact people for an additional explanation of something. The invoices might not be sufficiently clear on the extent of the construction or alteration. In those cases, where claims have been selected for risk review, we have the option of either fully approving them, partially approving them or fully rejecting them.

It may be a that there is an invoice. We have a couple of hundred thousand invoices on our system relating to what has been submitted. Members can imagine the variety of what is in those. For example, if there are 20 invoices in a claim and one of those is ineligible, Revenue can get the money out the door relating to the rest of the claim and have the discussion with the claimant about the other one.