This article is from page 15 of the 2013-07-16 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 15 JPG
A TOTAL of € 4.06 million has been collected from households in County Clare from last year’s household charge.
The € 100 tax per household proved controversial at the time, and has since been replaced with the property tax. The Revenue Commissioners have not yet provided an analysis by county of the Local Property Tax collected to date.
However Clare people have proved to be compliant with the former household charge with more than 80 per cent paying up.
Clare county councillor Christy Curtin (Ind) believes the Government should return money taken from the council coffers last year because just over 60 per cent of property owners had paid the charge.
The high compliance rate and the amount of money collected makes a good argument for the funding to be returned he maintained.
The General-Purpose Grant allocation from the Local Government Fund was reduced by € 243,631 in July 2012 as a penalty set by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government.
This reduction was based on the level of household charge compliance achieved up to July 2012. This adjustment was confirmed by the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government in September 2012.
The household charge introduced in 2012 has been replaced by the Local Property Tax, which became operational on July 1, 2013, resulting in a half year Local Property Tax charge in 2013. A full year charge will apply from 2014 onwards. In 2013 there is not a direct allocation to Local Authorities from the Local Property Tax.
Niall Barrett, Head of Finance at Clare County Council, said the Minister of Environment, Community and Local Government has indicated that of money collected from Local Property Tax in 2014, 80 per cent of the amount collected for a county will be remitted to the local authority where the tax is raised.
“The remaining 20 per cent of the tax collected nationally will be redistributed on an equalised basis to local authorities within the context of the annual allocations of the General Purposes Grants,” he said.