While the transformation programme will come to an end, Inland Revenue will continue to embed the changes made over the last few years. We will continue to look for opportunities to modernise the revenue system and make the most of our new capabilities:
- Self-service options for customers mean they can do more for themselves with less effort and without needing to contact us. This frees us up to help customers who cannot use digital services or have complex needs.
- Responsive and resilient systems mean we can respond more quickly and innovatively with new policies and products when required, including collaborating with others on design and implementation. We can operate remotely even when there are disruptions to our offices.
- More complete and accurate data combined with our ability to bring information from different places together means we can better understand customers’ needs and risks to the system. We can tailor services depending on customers’ understanding and capability. This is helping us to decide when we should proactively contact customers and how we should communicate with them.
- Digital connections with third parties make it easy for the appropriate information to be exchanged between systems. This is reducing effort and re-work for both customers and Inland Revenue.
Many new products or services can now be implemented much more quickly than previously as our systems are flexible. We showed this in the way we responded to COVID-19, with new products made available within weeks.
We will continue to work with our public and private sector partners to deliver on wider outcomes. This could range from sharing our expertise through to changing how public services are delivered. For example, we can share information with other agencies or organisations, with appropriate security permissions, to help them deliver services. The portal we put in place to support the Ministry of Social Development to administer the wage subsidy shows how this approach can work in practice.