IRD website back online after switch-over

Inland Revenue says its website and call centres are back online after a week-long outage during which it implemented a key stage of its $1.6 billion Business Transformation project.

Spokeswoman Gay Cavill said the change-over to the new software went as planned and no issues had been reported to the department.

However, there were isolated complaints from some taxpayers yesterday morning. The principal of an Auckland school said the new website kept crashing when he tried to use it.

A few other taxpayers took to social media to report specific issues.

One complained they could no longer save tax documents from the website in PDF format, while a tax agent reported losing access to some client information.

It was not clear yesterday morning whether those problems were ‘‘one-offs’’ or widespread.

‘‘There will be a few wrinkles,’’ Cavill said. ‘‘Something of this size you don’t do and expect nothing to be a hiccup.’’

Inland Revenue’s myIR online services, call centres and offices had been closed to the public since April 18. Inland Revenue had provided advance warning that any partially completed online tax returns and messages that had been saved in draft on its website would be lost during the shutdown.

The changes are being driven by Inland Revenue’s decision to gradually retire its ageing mainframebased computer system First, which uses Cobol software that has become increasingly difficult to update and support, while at the same time simplifying the tax system.

The most visible result of the changes will be that Inland Revenue will now begin automatically issuing 1.7 million annual tax refunds and about 115,000 tax bills, without taxpayers having to fill in forms.

The overall Business Transformation project is expected to result in the loss of about 1500 jobs by 2021. Chief people officer Mark Daldorf revealed in November that about half of those cuts had been made.