IRD is hoping for website failures, disconnected calls will not be repeated next year

The Commissioner of Inland Revenue said that he would try to avoid the series of failures of his online MyIR system and hundreds of thousands of calls cut off. 39 next year, when it will implement automatic tax refunds for the first time

. Collector has disconnected 45 percent of calls made – 286,392 calls out of 630,921 – in June, with 79,621 other calls waiting to join the customer service team, according to a law request on information published by Stuff. This was before the due date of July 7 for filing tax returns.

Commissioner Naomi Ferguson, who has held this position since July 2012, told Parliament's Finance and Expenditure Committee this morning that the Inland Revenue had had seven major issues with MyIR for 10 days in June. Some of these failures meant that the system was completely offline, while others made the system slower or presented users with a corrupt and unusable Web page, she said. "Between June and July, we had 6.8 million uses of the MyIR system, that is the type of volume that it manages, and when it is offline, even for one hour, this has a significant impact, "said Ferguson. "Since June 27, the solutions we have put in place are managing it.

" This is not acceptable, and it is something we will continue to work on, and we will seek to learn this year for next year. "

Ferguson says that most taxpayers are now contacting IRD online, and that call centers are" overflowed ", so when web services fail," this immediately affects call centers. "

IRD staff was originally on strike alongside workers at the Ministry of Enterprise, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), but MBIE resumed wage negotiations.

Best Start tax credit, which strikers cited as a drastic increase in their workload pushing them to industrial action, "did not constitute a significant share "service failures of the IRD, but agreed that the strikes had an impact on the volumes of calls that we could handle during these

The changes to the tax legislation, which were filed at the end of June, which are currently being reviewed by a special committee, would eliminate the need for individuals to produce a Personal Tax Summary (PTS) to obtain a tax refund – some 750,000 people are currently missing. to their reimbursement s tax each year due to not filing.

Ferguson said that she would like next year to be "a very different customer experience."

"It will be a time of change, and I am aware of it. I automatically authorize refunds, but I know we will receive calls from people saying, "Why did not I get my refund?" We must expect that there is a lot of requests, that's what we expect, and we will work to maintain the stability of web services and work with STP officers.

The Department of Finance is undertaking a business transformation program to modernize the tax system. The second phase of the changes under this program, implemented in April, was designed to help businesses manage their income taxes online more easily.

(BusinessDesk)

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