This year, 3 payments totalling $350 went to help 1.72 million New Zealanders with day-to-day living costs. This delivered on a Government announcement in Budget 2022.
This was a new type of payment for New Zealand, and we needed to build the system to make the first payments in August 2023. To meet this date, we recommended, and Government agreed to, a number of decisions, including the following:
- Payments would be made based on our information.
- There would be no application process to provide or verify information.
- A person’s income would be determined by finalised tax assessments only, and would be individual income, not household income.
- There would be no recovery action taken for payments made incorrectly due to Te Tari Taake Inland Revenue having wrong information.
- Customers could opt out of the payments.
Ahead of the second and third payments in September and October 2022, we refined our screening tests for eligibility using additional data. For example, extra screening looked for non-eligible people using an overseas IP address to log into myIR or people who had filed a non-resident individual income tax return for the 2022 tax year.
Following the August 2022 payment, the Auditor-General reviewed the scheme. He recommended that we consider improvements to future payments to:
- ensure they are targeted appropriately, and
- highlight that ineligible people who have received a payment have an obligation to repay it.
As at 3 July 2023
- $573 million has been paid out in total.
- The number of payments:
- August 2022: 1.68 million
- September 2022: 1.63 million
- October 2022: 1.6 million.
- 67,000 customers have not received the payments because we do not have their bank account information. These customers can give us their information up until 31 March 2024.
- 13,000 customers have made repayments, totalling $1.6 million.
- 15,000 customers opted out of receiving 1 or more payments.