John O'Mahony (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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69. To ask the Minister for Finance if he will provide a phone and/or email service for Members of the Oireachtas for the Revenue Commissioner's local property tax service due to the large volume of calls and that fact persons and Oireachtas Members are unable to receive information received from constituents as constituents are unable to get through or left holding on the property tax local call number for over 50 minutes; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [47740/13]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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Revenue has acknowledged to me that exceptional delays in accessing the Local Property Tax (LPT) Helpline, which is the primary contact point for LPT queries, were experienced by some callers in the days immediately following the issue of the 2014 notifications. In response to the demand for service, Revenue deployed extra resources to the helpline, within two days of the peak period occurring and also deployed extra resources to its own internal support service to cater for the more complex queries. Revenue has put contingency plans in place to further rapidly increase the number of agents on the helpline should it be necessary to do so. In total there are now 200 agents fully deployed to LPT telephone call handling. In addition to the extra staff deployment, callers can now leave their telephone contact details on the system in preference to waiting for service and will receive an out of hours ‘call back’ from the LPT team. Revenue has also extended the helpline opening hours from 9am to 5pm to 8am to 8pm since 6 November and will maintain these hours for the peak filing periods.

I have been assured by the Revenue Commissioners that the helpline is sufficiently well serviced to deal with queries from customers and waiting times having significantly reduced in recent days. The Commissioners have confirmed that in view of this, there are no plans to put in place a dedicated helpline or email for Oireachtas Members for LPT related queries. The Commissioners further note that there is already a dedicated phone service in place for Oireachtas Members (01 6748102) who have any tax related queries.