IRD bulks up call centres to handle 'biggest tax change in a generation'
Friday, 8 March 2019
Inland Revenue has contracted an additional 325 call centre workers to deal with a deluge of calls that it expects as a result of changes to the tax system this year.
However, IRD commissioner Naomi Ferguson said she still expected there would be days when it would be hard to contact the department.
Ferguson said the extra staff had been contracted from private company Madison Recruitment.
The recruitment firm was criticised by the Unite Union last year for attempting to hire Inland Revenue contract workers through an independent employment agreement that provided no written guarantees over their hours, pay or place of employment.
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From April this year, Inland Revenue will begin automatically issuing 1.7 million annual tax refunds and about 115,000 tax bills, as a result of changes brought about by the second stage of its $1.6 billion to $1.8b Business Transformation project.
Previously people had to fill in forms before getting the refunds or bills.
The changes, which stem from what Ferguson described as 'maybe one of the most substantive changes to the tax system for decades', are designed to make tax simpler.
But Ferguson said Inland Revenue was expecting calls to the department to increase initially as some people questioned why they were getting the refunds and bills, and checked they were not scams.
'We expect something like 1.8 million calls between March and July, which is about 20 to 23 per cent more than the volume last year,' she said.
'There will still be days when it will be hard to contact Inland Revenue,' she earlier told a select committee.
Ferguson said the 325 outsourced call centre workers started at Inland Revenue from November and were complementing about 900 call centre staff who are directly employed by the department.
Some of the extra workers would be offered work until September, with others finishing up in November, she said.
Inland Revenue selected Madison as its provider of contract call centre staff last year, after dropping its previous provider, Salmat.
Madison last year offered individual employment agreements to Salmat contractors working for Inland Revenue that required they agree Madison might not be able to provide them with a written guarantee of their hours, pay or place of employment.
One of the workers, Ben Chipping, who had been working out of Inland Revenue's offices on Hawkestone St in Wellington since the previous November, said last year that the agreement was 'quite possibly the worst I have come across in my life'.
Another contract call centre worker complained at the time that she felt she had 'been treated like I am nobody and my skills mean absolutely nothing'.
Inland Revenue spokesman Baden Campbell said only two of the staff accepted contracts with Madison, though a few more joined subsequently through Madison's 'regular recruitment process'.
Madison chief executive Simon Bennett said the employment agreements were always intended to be supplemented by job briefs that it provided staff when they were engaged by particular customers, such as Inland Revenue, that set out the details of each assignment.
He said the base contracts were aimed at temps who might be assigned jobs at short notice, and agreed they were not appropriate for the outsourced Inland Revenue workers.
'For clarity we should have said at the time, 'we know where they are going, we know how long and on what pay, let's put them on a fixed-term contract specific to that role to avoid any confusion'.
'Not giving excuses, but there was time pressure and we really did want to make sure that if people wanted to come over we could let them,' he said.
Madison had since made changes to its individual employment agreements and the 'new intake' of contractors Madison had supplied to Inland Revenue were on fixed-term contracts where there was a longer period of work, Bennett said.
Those workers were paid above the living wage once they had been trained, and he said he would be surprised if any did not have fixed hours.
A 'job brief' provided by Madison to the Sunday Star-Times stipulated a pay rate of $22.50 for one outsourced role at Inland Revenue.
Unite Union organiser Shirley Wang said she still had concerns about that contract which she maintained remained – as it was worded – a 'zero hours' contract.
Although the sample job brief stipulated eight-hour days with working hours being within the times of 7am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, Wang said that did not guarantee a 40-hour week.
'It doesn't guarantee you how many days per week you will be required to work. A contract has to state what are the minimum guaranteed hours per week and I can't see that written anywhere.'
Bennett disagreed, saying the intent of the contract, and in his view its application, was to guarantee a 40 hour week. He agreed that could have been made more explicit.
Ferguson said Inland Revenue had a conversation with Madison in the light of concerns that were raised last year and was comfortable with how that was managed.
In practice, contract staff provided by Madison who worked at Inland Revenue were expected to be there for 'a number of months' and had been provided with 'all of the same support, training, tools and resources', she said.
Ferguson would not comment on whether she would sign an employment agreement of the type originally provided by Madison last year, saying she did not think that was a reasonable question.
'What I am really comfortable with is the working experience those people are actually having working alongside us and providing great support,' she said.
Inland Revenue had so far spent a total of $725m on the Business Transformation project which was running a little under budget, she said.