Everything we do is aimed at helping people to pay the right amount of tax and get the right social policy payments. This influences how we design policy, products and services; the advice and education we provide; and how we approach investigations and litigation.
We use our analytical capabilities to identify where customers are not getting things right and decide how we can help them. We might text them or let them know through myIR. If it's something a lot of customers are getting wrong, we might send texts or put messages out on social media.
For instance, we called more than 5,000 customers this year, including people newly in business or just elected to Māori authorities, to work through their tax obligations and any issues they may have.
We also reached out to 250,000 customers in April 2022 to let them know about new reporting requirements for trusts and we've continued to explain to people that they may need to pay tax on profits from the sale of a property.
The bright-line property rule means people may need to pay tax on any profits from selling a house within 10 years of buying it. People do not have to pay tax when they're selling their main home or an inherited property.
This year, we've continued to make more people aware of bright-line by communicating online to build awareness, sending information to tax professionals, conveyancers and solicitors and holding webinars.
We can now identify sales that may fall within the bright-line rule. Every month we're in touch with between 500 to 800 people who've recently sold a property to let them know that they may have tax to pay.
To make it easy for customers, when we become aware of a sale, we pre-populate information in the property section of their myIR account and alert them to check out this information. This year, we've also started pre-populating information in the customer's bright-line residential property sale information form (IR833) as an attachment to their tax return, unless they'd told us the rule does not apply. We expect customers to include the income in their tax return, and we check to see that they have.
| Compliance by design | Facilitating compliance | Interventions for those who do not get it right |
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| Most people get it right | Right from the start | Errors and deliberate non-compliance |
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Analytics and intelligence
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Targeted campaigns and interventions
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Upstream and downstream activities
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Our compliance framework reflects what we've aimed to achieve through our transformation programme - collecting more revenue for New Zealand, with less effort by us and our customers.
We design the tax and social policy system with compliance in mind
The left side of the framework shows how we design tax policy, systems, processes and guidance to help about 95% of our customers get their tax obligations right.
We use analytical tools to help ensure people comply
The centre of the framework shows the tools and intelligence capabilities we use to act in real time, and identify and assist customers who need more help to comply with their tax obligations.
We have interventions for people who do not comply
The right side of the framework shows the interventions we can use with the very few customers who need more help to get things right or more of our attention because they deliberately try to avoid their obligations.