Woods taxes the evidence on impact of IRD job cuts

Labour’s revenue spokesman Michael Woods said huge job cuts at IRD was the Government ‘‘taking the knife to IRD’’ when we needed a highly-skilled department to ensure multinationals and speculators didn’t get away with dodging tax. It was cutting those ‘‘tasked with ensuring that the big end of town pays its fair share’’. But was there any concrete evidence of that, or that the $1.9 billion Business Transformation IT upgrade would lessen, not improve, compliance?