The LPT redux

The government must be thanking its lucky stars that it decided to use Revenue to implement the payment of Local Property Taxes and perhaps wondering why it didn’t pull a similar stunt in relation to water charges – but of course that would have been to pull away the cosmetic facade that this was not a fund raising exercise rather than an effort, at least in part, to change ‘behaviours’.

Anyhow, the SBP notes that:

Earlier this month, the Revenue announced that 130,000 LPT compliance letters had been sent in respect of unpaid property tax bills for 2013, 2014 and 2015.
New figures from the Revenue indicate that the clampdown has yielded €12.2 million since March 2, with the tax authority receiving tens of thousands of calls to its LPT helpline this month.

Then there was this:

Meanwhile, close to 350,000 property owners will see their 2015 local property tax deducted from their bank account tomorrow, via a single debit authority, having chosen this option when they filed their LPT return last year. The Revenue spokeswoman said that approximately 344,000 chose this option.

That got me wondering, just how many people pay LPT in the state? This from 2013 is indicative:

The exact figure for the total number of liable properties is not known. A figure of around 1.96 million was mentioned by Minister Hogan and Revenue .