Tax affects everyone and social policy programmes affect most New Zealanders too. As well as collecting revenue, we’re responsible for administering a range of social policy products including Working for Families, child support, KiwiSaver, student loans, paid parental leave, unclaimed money, Family Boost, and support payments that rely on income information to determine eligibility.
Our customers include all people earning income in New Zealand and people who live overseas but have tax affairs and/or social policy obligations here.
The money we collect helps pay for the essential services that all New Zealanders benefit from such as healthcare, social policy payments, education and protecting our environment.
Our individual customers
It’s important to our individual customers that we:
- send annual tax assessments out quickly and explain things clearly
- help people pay what they should on time
- make it straightforward to set up a plan for repaying an overdue debt.
3.5 million customers:
- received an automatically issued individual income tax assessment in the tax year to March 20231
3.4 million KiwiSaver members:
- were enrolled in the scheme at 30 June 2024. We transferred $10.4 billion to scheme providers to invest in 2023–24.
618,000 student loan borrowers:
- made $1.6 billion in repayments in 2023-24.
$328 million in donation tax credits:
- went to 313,000 customers in 2023–24.
Families and whānau
Families and whānau want us to:
- give them certainty about the payments they receive from week to week
- take the time to understand their situations and work through options for receiving entitlements or paying child support.
Along with the Ministry of Social Development Te Manatū Whakahiato Ora, IR distributed $3.1 billion in net entitlements:
- to support working families in 2023-24.
145,000 children:
- were supported by the Child Support Scheme.
$480 million in child support:
- was collected from more than 127,000 parents in 2023–24 and $413 million was distributed to carers.
$642 million:
- in paid parental leave payments went to around 54,000 new parents in 2023-24.
Businesses
Providing certainty and clarity for businesses is critical so they can manage their tax obligations. It’s important that we:
- help new businesses get their tax right from the start
- reduce the effort and uncertainties involved in paying tax
- understand their circumstances if they’re going through difficulties
- make it easy to advise us about any significant loss of income or set up an instalment arrange to pay a debt.
250,000 employers:
- filed more than 7.2 million employer information returns in 2023–24.
708,000 customers:
- were registered for GST at some point in 2023–24. They filed 3.19 million GST returns.
435,000 company returns:
- were filed in the 2023 tax year.1
2 million income tax returns:
- were filed in the 2023 tax year.1
1Figures for the tax year ended March 2024 are not available for this Statement of Intent because some customers who use tax agents have until April 2025 to file their 2024 returns.