IRD offline as lockdown aid sought

Business owners looking to apply for the resurgence support package were now able to use MyIR yesterday after scheduled maintenance was completed faster than expected.

MyIR had been offline over the weekend to allow for an update of the system.

However, this left business owners unable to apply for the resurgence support package, announced on Tuesday.

In order to qualify for the payment, businesses must show a 30 per cent drop in revenue over a seven-day period compared with a typical similar revenue period in the six weeks prior to the alert level rise.

Yesterday morning, Auckland moved up to alert level 3 and the rest of the country moved to level 2. Business owners looking to apply for the package were greeted with a notice saying the MyIR system was offline for the weekend.

Inland Revenue spokeswoman Gay Cavill initially said the MyIR system would be back up at 8am today. But by 4pm yesterday,

MyIR was working again.

‘‘Inland Revenue’s systems are back online early after completing the latest round of business transformation work ahead of schedule,’’ Cavill said.

‘‘Because the upgrade went really well, Inland Revenue has been able to reinstate its MyIR service and reopen applications for the resurgence support payment through MyIR from now.’’

Cavill said the MyIR process to apply for the resurgence support package was very quick and prefilled with data Inland Revenue already had for individual business customers.

The decision to shut down the MyIR platform was not made lightly, she said.

‘‘We did consider putting in an interim measure of some sort but that would only have made the process cumbersome,’’ Cavill said.

‘‘It will be quicker to do it on Monday than using any interim tools would have been.’’

The wage subsidy scheme would also be available to businesses that had experienced a 40 per cent drop in revenue in a 14-day period, compared to a typical fortnightly revenue period in the six weeks before the rise in alert level.