Vol. 535 No. 1
265 Mr. Gormley asked the Minister for Finance if his attention has been drawn to the fact that the INTRASTAT office continues to send out monthly forms to businesses throughout the State, even though many businesses are making their returns for the last year by disk as suggested by the Revenue Commissioners; his views on whether this is a waste of paper and taxpayers' money; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11838/01]
I have no responsibility for INTRASTAT which is a project of EUROSTAT, an agency of the European Union, nor do I set out its procedures. Revenue has an ongoing policy of encouraging the use of electronic methods for the submission of data by traders. Revenue's VIMA office in Dundalk collects data for INTRASTAT. Currently 60% of data, by volume is submitted electronically to that office. Most of those taking up the electronic option, however, have been large or very large traders and consequently the number of traders who submit electronically is relatively small. In other words, the majority of INTRASTAT traders still submit their statistical data by means of the official paper form. Currently 1,274 traders submit their data on diskette.
I am informed by the Revenue Commissioners that the main compliance problem in INTRASTAT is ensuring traders submit their data, whether on diskette or on the paper form, on time each month. Many traders have to be constantly reminded of this requirement and the sending out of the form acts as a reminder. In fact, many traders have, in addition, to be telephoned, often more than once, to point out that their data for the previous month has not been received. The Central Statistics Office and EUROSTAT, on whose behalf the Revenue Commissioners collect these statistics, insist on adherence to very strict deadlines. Regular campaigns have been mounted over the years since the introduction of INTRASTAT in 1993 to explain to traders the importance of statistics both to themselves and to the Government and to encourage them to be more compliant.
In the context of these compliance difficulties, the Revenue Commissioners decided to continue to issue the official INTRASTAT forms each month to all traders, including those who were submitting the data on diskette. In most companies, the arrival of the form from VIMA is the trigger which initiates a process of collation and submission of the requisite data. Another reason for adopting this approach is that the form is sent out with a pre-paid envelope and most electronic traders use this envelope to return their diskette to VIMA.
It should also be pointed out that some traders, because they deal with their imports differently from their exports, submit their arrivals, or imports, data electronically and their despatches, or exports, data on the paper form. They need the official form which is bar coded and unique to the particular month, in respect of the latter. In addition, companies that usually submit returns electronically sometimes revert to the official month-specific bar-coded form when their system goes down or for some internal reason.
