Annual Report 2006: Part four - Charter report and Statement of service performance

Our charter commitments

Inland Revenue's Charter is our commitment to ensuring that we have effective relationships with our customers. It sets out our aspirations for providing advice and information, acting consistently, and guarding privacy and confidentiality. By continuing to improve the standard of our service and observing the safeguards in our Charter, we will strengthen the community's confidence in Inland Revenue. This is reinforced by customers having the opportunity to question us through our Complaints Management Service.

Many of our important initiatives and ongoing activities are detailed elsewhere in this report. The following outlines how many of our initiatives and activities support our Charter.

How we will work with you

We regularly survey our customers about the service we provide and ways in which we can improve. We have sustained consistently high levels of customer satisfaction with our service. This year, despite meeting high levels of customer demand, 79% of our customers rated our service as good or very good.

In July 2005 we made significant changes to our customer satisfaction survey to improve our understanding of our eight key customer groups²⁹. Results for each customer group are shown in figure 28.

This year, we improved services to deaf, hearing-impaired and speech-impaired people with the introduction of call centre services through New Zealand Relay. Using this system the customer speaks or types their message which is passed on to Inland Revenue's customer service representative by the relay assistant. The relay assistant then types back the customer service representative's response to the customer.

We also meet with and provide information to groups and individuals on tax and social support issues. This year, we continued to focus on informing people about Working for Families and providing general advisories to our business customers (for example, small and medium enterprises). Our participation in the multi-agency Heartlands centres, and support of Citizens Advice Bureaux, also enables us to engage with our customers in the community. We have approximately 150 people involved in advisory work and this year we maintained a customer satisfaction rating of 97% for this work.

We achieved our correspondence timeliness performance standards this year while dealing with increased correspondence volumes. 82% of general correspondence was answered within three weeks, and 96% within six weeks.

Reliable advice and information

Ensuring that our people have the appropriate skills and technical competencies is essential for providing correct tax information and advice.

Every six months we measure the change in our people's technical competency rating. Their overall competency rating has increased by 7% between June 2005 and June 2006. We record calls to our call centres and use these to assist training our people and to help design better customer service methods. By monitoring calls we can ensure that the information we provide is consistent, clear and accurate.

In all cases we aim to give our customers an answer that is correct, complete, clear, timely and appropriately referenced. We achieved a result of 73%³⁰ for our child support customers and 83% for our other customers.

We have continued to implement new and better ways to provide advice and information. For business users of our services we have:

• developed industry specific educational seminars to support customers with new businesses
• supported the television series Business is Booming - a programme designed to help businesses understand a range of issues related to taxation and present this with other business-focused information
• begun an early intervention initiative where we contact customers who are late in filing and paying. It is aimed at ensuring their cash flow is not adversely affected due to unpaid taxes.

Confidentiality and privacy

To help maintain the integrity of the tax system, the community must have confidence in our ability to keep their personal information confidential. We use our training programme on integrity and ethics, Judge for Yourself, and our Code of Conduct to focus our people on their obligations to maintain secrecy of the information we hold.

When new staff join Inland Revenue they are required to complete the Judge for Yourself programme and Code of Conduct training as part of their induction. We regularly explore new initiatives to evaluate what further improvements could be made in helping staff understand their obligations in this area.

To help ensure compliance with the Tax Administration Act 1994 and the Code of Conduct we constantly monitor our computer systems to ensure that staff access to customer data is for business reasons only. We fully investigate and take appropriate action against any breaches of secrecy or unauthorised access to customer information.

Consistency and equity

We need to provide our customers with a consistent interpretation of the law. We also need to apply the law in a way that considers the individual circumstances of each customer. For example, by putting in place instalment arrangements to clear debt in a way that is realistic and sustainable for the customer.

We show our commitment to achieving consistency and equity by our efforts to ensure that customers receive their correct family support entitlement. We take proactive steps, such as checking actual income against predicted earnings, to avoid debt being incurred or an overpayment being made if customers' circumstances change. In 2005-06 83% of family assistance customers were not overpaid, an improvement from 78% last year.

Your right to question us

Our customers have a range of options for questioning our decisions and resolving disagreements. These include contacting:

• our Complaints Management Service if they do not want to approach the office that originally handled their case, or are dissatisfied with a proposed resolution
• the Minister, the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, or other authorities dealing with complaints or disputes.

Complaints Management Service

Our Complaints Management Service features extensively on our website and in our publications.

In 2005-06 there were 6,684 complaints received, compared  to 5,923 last year. Most of the increase occurred during the first quarter of the year and was related to increasing service demand as a result of implementing changes to Working for Families and student loans.

We use the feedback from complaints to improve our processes and service to our customers. For example, feedback about the style and wording of GST reminder letters was incorporated into replacement letters from 1 January 2006.

The information gained from complaints is also used to help plan, implement and review our peak period of customer demand, and to ensure we are improving our service in areas which are of most benefit to our customers and organisational efficiency.

There has been little change in the proportion of each type of complaint, except for an increase in complaints about our telephone services to 15% from 7% last year. 44% of all complaints were about Inland Revenue procedures, a similar level to last year (47%). Complaints about correspondence remained the same as last year at 14%, while complaints about our staff decreased by 3% to 12%.

Figure 29 -
Reason for complaint

[Long description]

We determined 47.5% of all completed complaints were valid, 19.4% partially valid and 33.1% were not valid. Of those customers we were able to contact after their complaint had been completed, 88% felt their complaint had been partially or full resolved.

Approaches to the Minister, Commissioner and other authorities

We dealt with 3,848 (2004-05: 2,332) approaches to the Minister of Revenue, the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, Ombudsmen, the Privacy Commissioner and the Human Rights Commissioner, the majority of which was written correspondence.

This year, income tax was the main issue raised in correspondence (83%), with a significant number relating to the Government's proposed changes to the taxation of offshore investments. Other issues related to child support (10%), family assistance (2%), student loans (1%) and GST (4%). 89% of correspondence was resolved by providing an explanation or information and 2% did not require any action or response. A further 6% was referred to other areas of Inland Revenue for action. 2% required changes to the customer's account (including financial relief by way of remission of penalties) and 1% required an apology.

The issues raised by customers contribute to our continuous improvement and organisational learning. For example, we received complaints about certain situations where customers had to apply in writing for remission of child support penalties. A policy change took effect in October 2005 to allow staff to accept child support penalty remissions of less than $100 by telephone instead of only in writing.

Ombudsmen and Privacy Act complaints

The Office of the Ombudsmen and the Privacy Commissioner are independent review authorities which undertake investigations for customers who have been unable to resolve their issues with Inland Revenue. We assist by providing impartial information about the cases they are investigating.

We received 114 (2004–05: 96) new Ombudsmen cases during the year. 109 cases were fully resolved during the year, including 12 from the previous year. Of these, 79 were informal enquiries and were resolved by a telephone call. 20 cases are still incomplete. Of the 28 formal cases completed, 23 were not sustained and 5 were partly sustained.

This year, we received 13 new privacy cases. Of these cases, five were resolved with none being sustained.

^29. Previously, only customer groups associated with the information services output class were used to calculate overall customer satisfaction. Because of the changes to the survey, satisfaction ratings from 1 July 2005 are not directly comparable to previous results.
^30. Child support changed its technical quality survey methodology this year. Results are not directly comparable to previous years as the previous methodology produced different results.

Other pages in: Part four - Charter report and Statement of service performance

• Statement of responsibilities
• Inland Revenue's charter
• Statement of service performance

Date published: 07 Nov 2006

Back to top