Mr. Eddie Taaffe:

In my experience with derelict sites levies, in a lot of instances the owner of the site is not in a position to transfer or pay cash. They do not have the means to pay it over. They might be elderly people. They might be a company that is only a shelf company. It does not exist anymore or it is unclear who the actual owner of the site is. What we do is we put a charge on the property so that if it comes up for sale, we can try to collect it at that point. It is very complex, however. In a lot of cases, in my experience it is not even clear who owns the site. We sometime cannot find who an owner is. We end up doing a CPO on it to clear up the title on it and get it back into the market public for sale with a title document associated with it. It is a very complex area. In some cases, for the amount of levy, it would actually cost us more in legal fees to collect a smaller levy. We have to make that judgment call on spending significant money through the legal process to collect a smaller debt. Our focus is not on collecting levy, it about getting derelict sites back into use as quickly as possible.