Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 3 December 2013
63. Deputy Michael Ring asked the Minister for Finance the way a person (details supplied) in County Mayo can pay their local property tax liability in view of the fact that they have never received any correspondence from the Revenue Commissioners for the 2013 liability or the 2014 liability; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [51434/13]
View answerI am advised by Revenue that a key aspect of the work undertaken in connection with the administration of Local Property Tax (LPT) was the development of a register of residential properties in the State. The process involved consolidating property address data, which was extracted from various Government and non-Government sources, in respect of almost two million records. In some instances the data matching was complicated by different variations in addresses and names held by the different agencies. In some instances, particularly in rural locations, the prevalence of non-unique addresses complicated the automatic upload of data to the Property Register. These relatively small number of cases required manual intervention to match the property to the correct owner. In this, I am advised that the person in question was not correctly linked to his property at the time of the 2013 LPT general issue. The required linkage did not take place because the person’s PPS number was not active on Revenue’s computer system at that time. As a consequence no correspondence issued to the person in regard to his LPT obligations.
Revenue has confirmed that the person’s daughter did file the 2013 Return through the online system and paid the tax due on his behalf. However, while the Return and payment were correctly recorded, the person’s PPS number did not transfer across to the Property Register and again as a consequence no output issued to him for 2014.
Revenue has assured me that the person’s details are now correctly linked on the Property Register and his records are fully up to date, in regard to both 2013 and 2014.
