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Statement of Intent - 2004 - Part 1

Ensuring we have the right capability - pages 37-39

Relationships

The nature of our relationship with our people is very important. Honest, open and supportive relationships contribute to positive relationships between our people and the wider community. A positive working environment also enables us to attract and retain staff, as well as improving productivity, ownership and commitment to our strategic direction.

The best indication of the nature of our relationship with our people comes from our annual climate survey. The 2003 survey indicated our people continue to demonstrate strong support for our strategic direction (16% above the public and private sector benchmark). Confidence in Inland Revenue as an employer has steadily increased from our 2001 climate survey, and is also above the benchmark. We have also experienced significant improvements in our results relating to recognition, pay and benefits, and learning culture.

We have a number of initiatives to maintain and enhance positive relationships with our people:

  • Our communications are designed to provide a strategic approach to building an environment that encourages open and effective communication between our people. This will allow us to further develop an organisational awareness of the importance of two-way communications and how effective communication benefits our people and our organisation by improving our ability to identify opportunities and mitigate risks.
  • Ensuring performance management systems are applied consistently across the organisation, and are simple to use. This includes clearly articulating what is expected of our people and rewarding appropriately to attract, motivate and retain good people.
  • Ensuring that not only Inland Revenue but the community feels our people act with integrity and professionalism. Our commitments and expectations are set out in our Charter and our Code of Conduct.
  • Ensuring a common understanding and awareness of the importance of ethics, integrity and honesty among our people through training of both new and existing staff. We are also developing our integrity assurance strategy, designed to both take a comprehensive view of integrity within Inland Revenue and determine the linkages with other appropriate strategies and initiatives.
  • Revising our health and safety strategy as part of our commitment to providing a healthy working environment.
  • Continuing to work closely with the three unions that represent our people-the Public Service Association (PSA), Taxpro, and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE).

Processes and technology

Our business environment is characterised by high volumes of complex transactions. We need to process these swiftly and with a high degree of accuracy. In addition, the community expects the introduction of seamless and personalised services and we are aiming to tailor many of our business processes accordingly.

Our technology strategy will ensure we have a sophisticated and reliable information technology environment that can develop to meet our future requirements. To date, this environment has been characterised by a number of different technologies to meet our diverse business needs. Our focus is to reduce the overall complexity, wherever possible, of our technology environment by adopting a smaller number of industry standard and proven products. As these types of products are easier to support, this shift will:

  • enable us to provide greater functionality to our business units
  • reduce the overall cost of support
  • improve our response times for the development and implementation of new products.

A key next step following on from the technology strategy has been the development of our Information Systems Strategic Plan (ISSP). The ISSP provides a more detailed roadmap of the products and services to be introduced over the next five years. One of the principal streams of the ISSP is our e-enablement initiative, discussed earlier in the section Enhancing our services.

External relationship

The strength of our relationships with the community, business, tax professionals, wider public sector and other tax administrations directly contributes to our capability to achieve our outcomes.

The community, tax professionals and businesses

We need to maintain community confidence to achieve our outcomes. How we are doing this is outlined in Strengthening our customer focus.

Public sector

We deliver a wide range of taxation and social policy services to the community, and it is important that we work closely with other agencies to ensure that these services are delivered in the best possible manner. Therefore, we need to coordinate our operational and strategic functions, not only within our organisation, but also with other government agencies. This is illustrated by our work on the upcoming family assistance reforms, where we have worked closely with the Ministry of Social Development and The Treasury.

A practical example of our operational and policy linkages was seen in our response to the flooding in central New Zealand in February 2004. To deliver a timely solution to affected taxpayers we needed to cooperate with a number of government agencies and community groups to implement operational strategies and provide advice leading to a change in tax legislation. The result was a positive outcome for taxpayers affected by the flooding.

We work with the central agencies, such as the State Services Commission, The Treasury, and Te Puni Kokiri on cross-public sector and emerging initiatives. These relationships ensure that our priorities align with those of government, and that we play our part in addressing cross-sector issues.

Because tax affects so many areas, our policy division works with most other government departments in the development of tax policy.

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Other pages in: Statement of Intent - 2004 - Part 1
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Date published: 16 Nov 2004

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