I am informed by Revenue that the difficulty in relation to the Local Property Tax (LPT) payment preference in this case arose in the first instance due to the person in question selecting two different payment options. When filing her LPT Return on 15 May 2013, the person selected both “deduction at source” from her Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine pension and payment through a service provider. It is acknowledged that the ‘duplicate’ payment options should have been identified during the validation process that uploads the taxpayer data to the Property Register, and referred to an operator for manual correction. Unfortunately this did not happen in this case, which resulted in the LPT Register failing to capture the preferred payment option. As a result the instruction to commence deduction at source was not activated. This processing error also resulted in a reminder letter issuing to the person in question indicating that no payment option had been selected.
Revenue has confirmed to me that LPT Branch has written to the person in question outlining the cost implications of commencing deduction at source at this point of the year. The letter includes a direct line phone number that the person can use to contact a member of the LPT team to discuss the issue further. On receipt of confirmation from the person that she is happy to progress with deduction at source, that payment option will be implemented.
Finally, while any processing error is unfortunate, Revenue has assured me that the vast majority of returns and payments received in regard to approximately 1.59 million properties have been accurately recorded on the Property Register and that the error rate is very small in the overall context of the scale of the 2013 LPT programme.
