To deliver the best services for our customers, Inland Revenue has continued to invest in our people. We have been building their knowledge and capability in areas such as policy agility, tax technical expertise and digital skills. Transferable skills and behaviours are equally important as we manage rapid changes in customer demand, technology and the future of work.
Most of our people have now moved into capability-based roles. They have learned to use new tools and embraced the opportunities provided through changes in how we work, such as working in multi-disciplinary teams across Inland Revenue.
We’ve become a smaller and more efficient organisation, with 27% fewer FTEs than in 2016. This has meant continuing to manage reductions in numbers while maximising opportunities for people and achieving the right capability for the future. We know that change can affect engagement.
We continue to listen to our people through our learning and development approach, wellbeing surveys and other feedback loops, to enable a positive experience for them.
This year, we’ve continued to make organisational design changes to support what Inland Revenue has become - a largely digital organisation focused on delivering services. We created 2 new business groups in corporate and enabling areas.
- Enterprise Design and Integrity helps our Commissioner and Executive Leadership Team to lead and govern Inland Revenue efficiently and effectively.
- Enterprise Services provides seamless, end-to-end back-office services for human resources, finance, technology, facilities and commercial services.
While anticipating there would be periods of higher staff turnover through our organisational changes, we experienced a similar rate this year - 10.4% compared to 10.5% total turnover in 2019-20. Turnover of people in tax technical roles was lower, at 3.1%.
We continue to work closely with our unions through change. The New Zealand Public Service Association (PSA), Taxpro and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) represent 82% of our people who are permanent or on fixed-term agreements.
We’re committed to working with the unions across a wide range of themes, and engaging at the right time, so they’re in a position to understand and influence decisions where appropriate, and work through any issues that arise.
You can read more about our organisational capability, including how we govern ourselves, our learning and development approach.
In November 2020, Inland Revenue won the Business Transformation through Digital and IT Award at the NZ CIO Awards in Auckland.
The judges paid tribute to a seamless integration of all our tax and most social policy products - a world first for a revenue organisation.
Patrick O’Doherty, Enterprise Architecture and Design Lead, and Richard Owen, Customer Segment Leader, accepted the award. Patrick acknowledged, “At its peak we had over 900 people on the programme so it has been a mammoth effort by the whole organisation.”
The NZ CIO award followed global recognition in October at the 2020 IDC Asia/ Pacific Digital Transformation Awards, where we won the Information Visionary category after being benchmarked against other organisations in the region.
Our Commissioner Naomi Ferguson said, “Everyone in Inland Revenue has played a huge part in our transformation. It gives us the confidence to continue our focus on improving services for all customers and to challenge ourselves to keep innovating. It also shows that an all-of-government approach can work, an investment made once can really improve outcomes for all New Zealanders.”