Online services save hours of taxpayers’ time

  • Todd McClay
Revenue

Revenue Minister Todd McClay says many hours of taxpayers’ time is being saved by Inland Revenue’s innovative changes to online and phone services.

The most recent is the ability to activate personal online MyIR accounts by text rather than having to phone Inland Revenue’s call centre to do it.

“That alone has saved 8 minutes for each of the 11,000 customers who’ve used the service in its first month,” says Mr McClay.

“That’s just over 1600 hours in one month, and of course call centre operators save that amount of time too, meaning they can be more efficient and help more customers more quickly.”

Mr McClay says more time on the phone had also been saved by people being able to file tax returns online, including e-filing and returns via Inland Revenue’s mobile app.

“Electronic filing is up to 6.6 million returns in 2015 compared to 5.7 million in 2014. That means a lot less time on the phone for taxpayers making returns-related enquiries - and for businesses, as we know, time is money.

“Inland Revenue estimates that some 89,000 taxpayers have been saved about 14 minutes each since 2013 by filing online. That’s because between February and August this year there were over 89,350 fewer phone calls about returns than in the same period for 2013.

“So doing the maths, that’s 20,766 hours of real time saved.”

Mr McClay says another time-saving innovation was the automatic voice identification service that taxpayers can sign up for. That means customer voices are instantly recognised by the system, making the enquiry process quicker and more efficient.

“There are now 1.5 million people signed up, meaning 15,500 hours of customer time saved.

“And every 100,000 more customers signed up to Voice ID means another 500 customer hours saved - for the customer and for our call centre,” he said.

“Inland Revenue is doing more and more to help New Zealanders meet their tax obligations. 80 per cent of refunds from Personal Tax Summaries were made in under a day and 75 per cent of all customer phone calls were answered in the first two minutes.
 
“Overall there has been a vast improvement and it’s clear that the effort and investment in modernising and simplifying tax processes and systems is already paying off.

“Our ongoing Business Transformation programme is totally customer focussed in its intention to modernise and simplify New Zealand’s tax administration by bringing it into the 21st century.

“This will result in even more time savings for individual taxpayers and businesses in the coming years,” says Mr McClay.