Part three - Key strategies and charter report: Inland Revenue's Charter
Inland Revenue's Charter
| Our Charter |
|---|
| Inland Revenue collects money to pay for public services and helps people to meet their obligations. We work within the Inland Revenue acts and other relevant laws. We also work in ways consistent with the spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi. |
| How we will work with you |
| We will be prompt, courteous and professional. We will follow through on what we say we will do. We acknowledge your individual, cultural and special needs and will look for solutions to them. The person you are dealing with will give you their name. We will continually improve our service by collecting information about how we are doing and using it to raise our performance. |
| Reliable advice and information |
| We will provide you with reliable and correct advice and information about your entitlements and obligations. We will assist you to get in touch with the right people for your needs. We will be well-trained and competent. We will keep looking for new and better ways to give you advice and information. |
| Confidentiality and privacy |
| We respect your privacy and treat all information about us as private and confidential. Information you provide will be kept secure and will be used or disclosed only as required by law. |
| Consistency and equity |
| We will apply the law consistently so everyone gets their entitlements and pays the right amount. We will take your particular circumstances into account as far as the law allows us to. |
| Your right to question us |
| You can question the information, advice and service we give you. We will inform you about options available for resolving disagreements and we will work with you to reach an outcome quickly and simply. For this Charter to work effectively, we rely on each taxpayer to provide all the relevant information when dealing with Inland Revenue. Signed by: David Butler Commissioner of Inland Revenue |
Our Charter commitments
Inland Revenue's Charter, introduced in 2001, is our commitment to having effective relationships with our customers. It sets out our aspirations for advice and information, acting consistently, and guarding privacy and confidentiality. We are beginning a review of our Charter in October 2007. On the following pages we outline how our initiatives and activities support our Charter.
How we will work with you
We regularly survey our customers about the service we deliver and how we can improve it. This year, we achieved a significant improvement in overall satisfaction with our service, with 82% of customers rating our service as good or very good. This is an increase from 79% in 2005-06.
The initiatives we developed or implemented during the year include:
- rolling out Language Line, a telephone-based interpreter service for customers whose first or preferred language is not English, to all our customers
- the Families Service Initiative for Working for Families Tax Credits and child support customers.
Our liaison officers work in the community to inform customers about their entitlements and obligations and get customer insights that we can use in future service delivery. We have over 160 people involved in advisory work and this year, they delivered 145,577 hours of advisory services, a 14% increase from 2005-06. 95% of customers were satisfied with the advisory services we provided.
We answered 1.81 million correspondence contacts and achieved a significant improvement in our timeliness performance standard this year. We answered 87% of correspondence within three weeks, compared to 82% in 2005-06, and answered 91% of child support correspondence within three 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.
We record calls to our call centres and use them in training our people and to help design better customer service methods. Monitoring calls can ensure that we provide consistent, clear and accurate information.
We aim to give every customer a correct, complete, clear, timely and appropriately referenced answer. We achieved a 90%[30] result in this area, a substantial improvement from 83% in 2005-06. Child support achieved a result of 88%.
We are working to reduce compliance costs and provide better advice and information for our customers. Services for business users this year include:
- starting an outbound calling initiative to all new employers to ensure they understand their obligations, know what support is available and to promote the use of our electronic services
- supporting, with the Ministry of Economic Development and other agencies, a second season of the television series Business is Booming - a production designed to provide easy-to-access tax information to business customers and increase their awareness of tax requirements and processes
- continuing our early intervention initiative where we contact customers who have missed filing a return or making a payment. This helps to identify issues preventing compliance and provides an opportunity to educate our customers.
Confidentiality and privacy
Our customers must have confidence that we will keep their personal information confidential and secure.
Our Code of Conduct sets out our standards of integrity and our expectations for how our people should behave as Inland Revenue and public service employees. We are reviewing our Code of Conduct to align it with the principles of the revised New Zealand Public Service Code of Conduct.
An important part our induction programme for new employees is our training programme on integrity and ethics, Judge for Yourself, and Code of Conduct training.
As well as educating and advising our people on their responsibilities, we constantly monitor our systems to ensure that our people only access customer information for business purposes. We fully investigate and take appropriate action against any breaches of secrecy or unauthorised access to customer information.
Consistency and equity
The interpretation of the law we provide our customers with needs to be consistent. We must also apply the law in a way that considers each customer's individual circumstances. For example, we have discretion not to assess penalties for taking an unacceptable tax position in cases of clear mistake or an honest oversight. We are also able to write off penalties for late payment of child support.
Our efforts to ensure that customers receive their correct Working for Families Tax Credits entitlement shows our commitment to achieving consistency and equity. This year, we introduced a new risk profiling and proactive contacts service to ensure as many customers as possible avoided an under or over payment.
Your right to question us
Any customer who wants to question a decision we have made or resolve a disagreement can contact our Complaints Management Service, the Minister of Revenue, the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, the Office of the Ombudsmen or the Privacy Commissioner.
These issues are managed by our Relationship Management Group. They are also responsible for identifying and raising areas for improvement and learning across Inland Revenue. We use the feedback we receive from customer correspondence and complaints to inform this process.
This year, 2,741 (64%) of the 3,843 approaches to the Minister of Revenue related to the government's changes to the taxation of offshore investments.
This year, we received 6,170 complaints compared to 6,684 last year. We also had a significant decrease in the percentage of complaints about our telephone services to 9% from 15% in 2005-06. Complaints about our internal procedures have risen to 50% from 44% in 2005-06. A breakdown of the reasons for complaints is shown in Figure 32.
Figure 32 -
Reason for complaint[31]
[ Larger version of image | Long description ]
Information on the process for making complaints is on our website and in our publications. Customers can make complaints online or contact the Complaints Management Service by telephone, fax or post.
We assist the Office of the Ombudsmen and the Privacy Commissioner by providing information about the cases they are investigating. This year, 61 cases were resolved without progressing into formal complaints, and 37 formal complaints were resolved with four being sustained by the Ombudsmen.
Four privacy complaints were received and for all of them the Privacy Commissioner found in favour of Inland Revenue.
30 The child support technical quality survey methodology was changed this year. Results are not directly comparable to previous years.
31 Figures for 2005-06 are in brackets.
Date published: 23 Oct 2007
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