Contact phone number for Revenue?

bonzodog2

Asking for a friend...
Anybody know of a landline number for Revenue? My friend is looking for something other than an 1850 one. For some reason. He lives in Co Galway, but is currently working a lot in Dublin area. Its to do with employment, so the 2 numbers at https://www.eirphonebook.ie/q/name/where/County%20Galway/who/revenue/?customerType=BUSINESS
don't seem appropriate.

nompere

The best way is using this page from the Revenue website:

https://www.revenue.ie/en/contact-us/index.aspx

bonzodog2

nompere wrote: »

The best way is using this page from the Revenue website:

https://www.revenue.ie/en/contact-us/index.aspx

Thanks. I had found that and will pass it on.

thesimpsons

http://www.saynoto1890.com/

if you looking for landline numbers, this is a great site

gerrybbadd

Generally, if a call comes through to an office like that, it will be directed on to the 1890 number anyhow

padyjoe

I tried to contact the Sout East Region, the 01 number works but was refused to be be dealt with, saying this is Dublin ring 1890. I still have to try the other 050 no. All I wanted to amend my tax cert.

Skedaddle

They need to stop using 1890 numbers or compel the phone companies to stop excluding them from bundled voice minutes.

It's totally unreasonable and unfair the way the mobile and landline companies suddenly charge you a fortune for calls to 1850, 1890, 0818 and even 076 VoIP.

There's no reason for this exclusion other than an opportunity to gouge people. There's no extra cost in switching the calls through their networks. They are just charging more because they can.

It's also killing what is a useful service for state bodies and businesses - the ability to give people a simple, single, memorable number and have flexible routing to whatever they need to connect that to.

It's the telcos that are at fault here and ComReg isn't reigning them in.

A lot of people don't even realise that 076 in particular isn't a geographic area code and end up with huge hills / blasting through credit because for some arbitrary reason their phone company has decided to exclude it from their voice bundle and charge some crazy per min rate for it.

amtc

There is a reason for it. It's for so called bursty number that could over flow the local exchange and hence these numbers go straight up to the tertiary exchange. This was a ComReg initiative at the time but was before bundles. Needs to be reviewed.

Skedaddle

It wasn't a ComReg initiative. They go way back to the days of the Telecom Éireann monopoly.

The main purpose of them isn't bursy numbers. That's only 18XX 71 XXXX, mostly used for radio phone ins and so on.

Those basically allow the local exchanges / mobile systems to decide to not connect the calls at all if they generating huge dumps of traffic. They do that by rejecting the call when they analyse the number, being able to identify it before having to actually process it.

The normal special rate numbers were introduced back in the days when long distance calls were very expensive and companies and state organisations were footing the bill for the extra above and beyond local rate. They also allow a single number to be used that's not associated with one location - it means you can avoid having to change numbers if you reorganize call centres and so on too and they are usually more memorable too.

These days very few people make calls on the basis of paying per minute. You're either calling out of a flat rate monthly plan that covers everything, or at least a large number of minutes as a bundle.

The problem is the providers all (or at least all of them I'm aware of) exclude these types of calls from those bundles and only allow either landline or mobile calls. There's absolutely no technical explanation for this. The calls are processed and switched exactly the same way.

From a technical point of view, most calls now go through "NGN look ups" and number translation. That's basically where the phone system has to figure out where to route the call, and doesn't just do it on the basis of the digits dialled. It's more like a web address being looked up and translated to an IP address by a DNS server. That's how it knows that your mobile number has changed provider, that your landline is now with Virgin and not Eir or that your calls have been forwarded.

Anyway, to cut a long boring technical explanation short, they’re deciding to charge these calls as crazy out of bundle amounts because they can. There is absolutely no technical reason whatsoever to do so. You’re simply being milked for whatever per min rate they default to.

ComReg should simply force them to treat 1850, 1890 as local calls and 0818 and 076 as national calls all to be taken from bundles and not charged separately.

This is a marketing and accounting issue. It’s not and never has been a technical one.

amtc

Given that I worked both in eircom and ComReg in this area, would hazard I know a thing or two!

Look at the interconnect rates, may be a clue as to why so profitable

Skedaddle

It’s just a gouging exercise, plain and simple. It’s exactly the same kind of game they play with out-of-bundle data suddenly being tens or even hundreds of times more expensive per MB.

Whether it’s a 1890 or 01 or 021 shouldn’t matter a damn to the end user.

You’re just being dumped back to 1990s rates.

Nobody particularly cares what the accounting or switching process is. The whole thing is totally consumer-unfriendly and confusing. Someone says “local rate” or “national rate” and you have a bundle that includes local calls yet you get charged a high per min rate.

1850 numbers launched in the early to mid 1990s before ComReg or the ODTR (its predecessor) existed and the usefulness of those codes was to offer customers “local rate” when national calls were extremely expensive. A call from Cork to Dublin in the mid 90s was 57pence for 3 mins which is (according to an online inflation calculator 1.12 Euro in today’s money.

So you can see why 1890 and 1850 were useful once upon a time. They’re a pointless service today - at least at the gouging prices charged for them.

There’s a ComReg consultation on going / just compete looking at scrapping several of those types of number and simplifying how they’re charged.

Hopefully they sort it out as the current regime is just resulting in customers getting screwed over and companies switching away from bothering to use those codes as they create bad experiences when someone gets a huge bill for a “local rate” numbers.

Until they’re a reasonable price, no state body should be depending on special rate numbers. They should all offer regular “geographical” phone numbers as an alternative.