ONE LANDLORD has paid the household charge for 190 properties, it has emerged.
The landlord filled out his form and included a cheque for €19,000, according to the Local Government Management Agency, the body with responsibility for collecting the charge.
If a landlord owns houses and wants to register them online, he has to do each separately, but those who are paying through the post or over the counter at local authority offices have to do so together.
Up to March 28th, some 41 landlords had paid the household charge and each had at least 50 houses.
There are 230,000 more forms that have to be analysed and processed.
The agency’s chief executive, Paul McSweeney, said on each day that they analyse the forms that come in, they receive a “single digit number” of forms with payments for 50 households or more.
However, the collection agency said it would not be able to provide any information as to whether housing associations or tenants associations were behind the multiple payments.
Some 886,000 householders had registered for the household charges by close of business yesterday.
Some 636,000 registered online, 154,000 came through postal applications and some 81,000 were handed in to a local authority.
Mr McSweeney said the fact that 230,000 forms are to be processed does not mean there are 230,000 homes to pay the household charge as many landlords will have multiple homes.
“Obviously there are people out there with a significant amount of property and are liable for the household charge, and because they did not want to incur fines and penalties they paid the charge on time,” he told RTÉ’s Today with Pat Kenny programme yesterday.
Only 13,835 homeowners who registered qualify for a waiver.
In addition, some 8,800 property owners registered online after the deadline on Saturday night and incurred penalties of €10 plus €1 in interest.
He said he was “immensely proud” of how local government staff had coped with the household charge.
“Our operational execution of this has been excellent,” said Mr McSweeney,
“In a very short period of time we built systems and processes from the ground up.”
