Inland Revenue continues to bombard taxpayers with correspondence that is duplicated, redundant, and in some cases, just plain wrong.
Worse, Inland Revenue seems to make very few distinctions between taxpayers who file their own returns and those who have engaged a tax agent to communicate with Inland Revenue on their behalf.
This severely undermines relationships between IRD and agents, IRD and taxpayers, and worst of all, between agents and their clients.
Postscript – In late November IRD advised as follows:
Tax agent redirect
We’ve received feedback that some of our letters are being issued directly to clients, rather than redirecting to tax agents. Over the past few weeks, we’ve undertaken a systematic review of all the letter currently set to not follow the tax agent redirect.
While some of these letters are correctly designed to go directly to clients, some have been programmed incorrectly, and we’re working on each letter individually to fix this. We’ll provide an update here once we have more information. You can find more information on the letters which we’ve already fixed in our archive.
We’re also working to update our system so that all new letters after April 2020 will be set to follow the tax agent redirect by default.
This is a positive development although:
- For ‘some’ letters – read hundreds of thousands of letters
- We’ve received feedback – read hundreds of agents complaining about this for the last two years or more
- Good to see it being resolved from April 2020 – of course IRD has made similar promises including to fix by April 2019
Imagine how much quicker this could have been resolved if IRD had not put so much effort into denying the problems existed
Read on “Inland Revenue bypassing tax agents – again and again and again”
