Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 12 November 2013
62. Deputy Terence Flanagan asked the Minister for Finance the action being taken to reduce call waiting times in the local property tax section of the Revenue Commissioners (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [47653/13]
Amharc ar fhreagraI am advised by Revenue that the introduction of Local Property Tax (LPT), which was the largest extension of the self-assessment system in its history, represents a very great administrative challenge. For example, Revenue has answered in excess of 580,000 telephone calls and replied to in excess of 200,000 letters or emails since March 2013. Revenue has further advised that because LPT is a new tax it is difficult to anticipate service volumes, and as a consequence the number of agents required.
Revenue has acknowledged that exceptional delays in accessing the 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. Access was also hampered on an intermittent basis on those days by technical issues in the service provider’s telephony system, which have since been resolved.
In response to the demand for service, Revenue ensured that extra resources were deployed 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. It 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 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.
Revenue has also extended the paper filing date by one week to 14 November to allow people further consider their 2014 payment method before committing their preferred option to Revenue. The combined initiatives of additional deployments, extended opening hours and the extended paper deadline have already significantly reduced the waiting times on the helpline.
Finally, I again commend Revenue for the excellent work it has done in taking LPT from concept to a fully functioning tax in such a short period of time, including the drafting of legislation, the building of a brand new property register, the provision of customer service to such a large volume of taxpayers and crucially the contribution of €215m to date to the Exchequer.
