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Already more than 2 million logins for IRD’s new tax system
Wed, 8th May 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

After celebrating the success of the transition of some 20 million records from one Inland Revenue computer system to another, the government department has reached another milestone.

Customers have logged into the new myIR more than two million times since one of the largest data migrations undertaken by a New Zealand government agency.

The records that were transferred represented around $5 billion in financial transactions that was undertaken over a seven-day shutdown of services.

Since Inland Revenue reopened on Friday 26 April, the new system has handled:

  • 2.1 million logins to myIR
  • 160,544 Working for Families payments made, worth $32.6 million in total
     159,794 payday filing returns
  • 83,777 GST returns
  • 22,432 individual income tax returns
  • 17,906 addresses updated in myIR
  • 8,561 donation tax receipts lodged

“This was a monumental task – far larger than our two previous releases but we have managed to complete it successfully,” says Inland Revenue transformation deputy commissioner Greg James.

Inland Revenue has been back and open for business for 12 days since the shutdown to implement the third release in its multi-year transformation project.

“We're pretty happy with the way the new system has been working in the first week or so but given the scale of what we've done there are bound to be a few bumps in the road ahead,” says James.

“The tax system that we have now is vastly superior to the one we had before and I think all taxpayers will get to experience the benefit of that. We realise that some of our changes will take some getting used to but we have a website that's packed full of information and our people are trained and ready to help.

Getting the new system up and running required more than 1,100 tasks to be completed, involving almost 300 people working across 185 hours.

“The scale of this year's release puts our two previous releases in the shade,” says James.

“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.

The department is already well into drawing up plans for release four, which involves bringing KiwiSaver and Student Loan records over to the new system.

“Our transformation is running on time and under budget and is already delivering benefits to New Zealanders,” says James.