New Zealand’s Inland Revenue had successfully issued two batches of automatic tax assessments, with over NZ$ 80 million of refunds going out to taxpayers. along with just over NZ$ 10 million of tax bills to pay.
Further batches will go out until the process is completed by the end of July.
Successfully dealing with customer influx
The new tax system, myIR, is breaking new records with the number of customers logging in, according to a recent press release.
Deputy Commissioner, Transformation, Greg James shared that the sort of numbers the new system is dealing with is far exceeding expectations.
The new system is taking all the logins in stride, whereas the old system would have slowed down or grinded to a halt with the number of customers using the system.
As reported, some 20 million income tax records, representing around NZ$ 5 billion in financial transactions, were moved over to Inland Revenue’s new tax system during a seven-day shutdown of services.
This migration was considered as one of the largest data migrations undertaken by a New Zealand government agency.
The latest release has not been without its wrinkles. However, this is to be expected with a transformation of this size and scale.
Tax agents are playing valuable role giving feedback if something is not happening the way they expect it to.
Their feedback contributes to the improvement of the system as the government agency is doing their best to be responsive in making the enhancements of adjustments.
Performance exceeds expectations
Week one has seen 247,379 assessments issued, which are comprised of:
- 178,457 refunds
- 29,080 bills to pay
- 39,842 customers who have been told they have already paid the right amount of tax throughout the year or have had a small debt written off.
The total value of refunds paid out so far is NZ$ 83.3 million and there are bills to pay worth $10.4 million. More batches will go out each week between now and the end of July.
Since the new system went live on April 26 it has handled:
- 1 million logins to myIR
- 93,833 IR3 returns filed by individuals, where in 99% were filed digitally
- 801,732 payday filing returns
- 690,148 Working for Families payments made, worth NZ$ 152 million in total
- 366,218 GST returns
Continuous improvement
Although the new system will take some getting used to and there are some features that could still be better, the new system is far superior than the previous one.
Almost 300 people worked across 185 hours to get the new system up and running. This job required more than 1,100 tasks to be completed.
myIR is a great platform to continuously develop and improve in order for New Zealanders to get the world class tax system that they deserve.
OpenGov Asia recently reported about New Zealand taxpayers to get a smarter system.
The Business Transformation Release 3 has allowed every single taxpayer account for Income Tax and Working for Families migrated from the legacy computer system to the new system called START.
