Another 'small wrinkle' surfaces after minister labels huge IRD upgrade a success

Sunday, 12 May 2019

Despite the niggles, Inland Revenue deputy commissioner Greg James appears to have so far overseen one of the public sector's biggest IT projects without major incident.

Another 'small wrinkle' has emerged following Inland Revenue's huge software change in April, with some people seeing child support payments that they make added to their taxable income, rather than subtracted from it.

Inland Revenue shut down its website and call centres for a week over Easter while it carried out a key stage of its $1.6 billion Business Transformation project, moving the income tax system off a 30-year mainframe and aging Cobol software to new software.

Spokesman Baden Campbell confirmed an error with the way some balances were now displayed on the myIR website for people making child support payments.

But he said it appeared to be impacting only a 'small number' of taxpayers and would not affect the tax they paid or entitlements they might be due, such as Working for Families.

* Inland Revenue says IT switch-over went smoothly despite grizzles

* Inland Revenue to cut 1500 jobs between 2018 and 2021**

Revenue Minister Stuart Nash is pleased with how Inland Revenue software change went.

'Fewer than 20 customers contacted us on this and we have confirmed that it was simply a display matter and did not affect their Working for Families payments in any way. Nor does it affect anyone's tax position or child support obligation,' he said.

'It's a matter of how the information is displayed in the new myIR [website], which we are aiming to remedy as soon as possible.'

Baden said the issue was a 'small wrinkle of the kind we were anticipating ahead of the upgrade'.

'Obviously you expect them in a project of this size. It is neither widespread nor ongoing.'

One Wellingtonian who contacted Stuff about the glitch indicated it had been inconvenient.

Unaware that it would not affect his entitlement, he felt the need to contact Inland Revenue to sort the issue out.

'Fancy a 30 minute wait on hold?,' he said.

Another glitch that has emerged since the upgrade has seen some student loans appear to vanish from people's accounts, though that also appears only a display error, with debts not actually cancelled in the system.

Some tax agents were blindsided by the department automatically refunding taxpayer balances that were in credit in situations where the department could not see any obvious tax debt they should be applied to.

Revenue Minister Stuart Nash said earlier this month that the IRD upgrade was one of the biggest IT projects undertaken by the public sector, involving the transfer of almost 20 million taxpayer accounts from one computer system to another and more than 1100 separate tasks that were carried out by 271 workers.

'Every single taxpayer account for income tax and Working for Families was migrated from the legacy computer system to the new system, known as Start.

'A lot could have gone wrong. But instead, everything appears to have gone right,' he said then.

But he acknowledged it was 'still early days and there are likely to be bumps along the way'.

'The new system will continue to be tested in the coming weeks,' he said.

Inland Revenue deputy commissioner Greg James said transferring the tax records had been a 'monumental task'.

'We're pretty happy with the way the new system has been working in the first week or so,' he said.

'Migrating income tax records was always going to be our biggest test but now that's been done we can begin the process of issuing automatic tax assessments later this month,' he said.

The next phase in Inland Revenue's BT programme will be moving KiwiSaver and student loan records to the new system.