Inland Revenue contact centres experience 'significant overloading' with calls at near-record levels

Wednesday, 5 June 2019

Inland Revenue says many people have been unable to get through to its call centres which are being overloaded by 'close to a record number of calls'.

One taxpayer said he and his wife and daughter had been trying to contact Inland Revenue over the past two weeks but had been repeatedly cut-off.

Another said they had waited 1 hour and 45 minutes last week, before 'giving up'.

May and June are normally busy months for Inland Revenue, but that appears to have been compounded by a high volume of queries resulting from an overhaul of the income tax system in April which the department has described as a success but which some taxpayers claim is throwing up problems.

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One source of problems appears to be an inconsistent recognition of provisional tax payments.

Inland Revenue is also part-way through writing to 450,000 taxpayers to advise them they have been paying the wrong rate of tax on their KiwiSaver investments and other managed funds, with a large number of bills expected, which may generate more calls.

Inland Revenue spokesman Baden Campbell apologised to people who had difficulty getting through to its call centres. 

'This is always the busiest time of the year at Inland Revenue and we expect June to be even busier with the introduction of automatically-calculated tax assessments,' he said.

'We have planned carefully for this year's busy period in anticipation of a 23 per cent increase in call volumes so we are devoting as much staff resource as possible to handling customer queries.

'There are more than 300 extra people answering phones than we had last year and there are a pool of staff we can pull from their regular duties when the need is greatest.'

But the volume of calls was such that Inland Revenue was still experiencing 'significant overloading at times', he said.

People with queries about their income tax were being warned on Tuesday morning to expect to spend at least 1 hour 15 minutes on hold, though that had dropped back to 43 minutes on Wednesday morning.

Baden said simple tasks such as updating personal information or bank account details and checking for 'frequently asked' information could be done online.

'An alternative is to try calling during our quieter periods, which are usually at the start of the day,' he said.