Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I accept the Deputy's point about fairness. That said, making any late changes to the statutory instrument at this stage is likely to give rise to difficulties at EU level. If a pragmatic approach was adopted by the registrar of the RBO with regard to marginally late filings vis-à-vis the deadline, that would be helpful. However, I would reiterate that the register has been open for filing since 29 July, which is almost four months or 110 days ago. We have 32% of returns filed at this point. If the system has crashed or has not been operating properly, as happened with ROS recently, then that is a legitimate reason for filings being late. A little bit of common sense can and should be applied here.

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