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Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Tuesday, 21 Nov 2000

Vol. 526 No. 3

Written Answers. - Departmental Staff.

Gerry Reynolds

Ceist:

225 Mr. G. Reynolds asked the Minister for Finance if he will have adequately trained staff in place to ensure that applications for higher education grants will be dealt with immediately in the future by the Revenue Commissioners in view of the fact that there have been inordinate delays and grants could not be drawn down due to necessary documentation not having been made available by the Revenue Commissioners. [26479/00]

I am advised by the Revenue Commissioners that guidelines for the higher education grant scheme are issued by the Department of Education and Science to the various bodies that administer the scheme. The scheme requires supporting documentation to be submitted with the application form. For the academic year 2000/2001, the required documentation included a copy of the most recent notice of assessment, as issued by the inspector of taxes.

Normally, the computer program to produce the annual notice of assessment is available in May-June each year. This year, however, there was a delay in issuing notices because the computer program to produce them for the 1999/2000 tax year was not fully operational until 11 September. The delay in having the computer program ready was due to the unprecedented demands on revenue's IT staff and resources arising from preparations for Y2K, the changeover to the euro, the introduction of the Revenue On-Line Service and continuing work on integrated taxation processing. The backlog of applications for notices of assessment for 1999-2000 has now been cleared.

As regards future years, revenue will make every effort to have the computer program available to enable staff in the inspector of taxes offices to process tax returns and issue the notices of assessment without delay.

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