“It is like a house full of appliances connected to electricity by a cable full of intertwined wires. In 2012, IR candidly described its Cobol-based First system as being “spaghetti-like” and hard to adapt. Those included enabling IR to quickly implement and evolve Covid relief schemes such as Resurgence Support Payments, which would not have been possible within First, she said. The technology switch had also delivered benefits on which it was hard to put a dollar-figure, she said.

“Ninety per cent of refunds go out to people who earn less than $70,000 a year and that money will have been really valuable to them”. Inland Revenue deputy commissioner of transformation Greg James provided a high level of transparency throughout the BT project, including proactively releasing the business case for the project at the outset.īut Ferguson said the changes brought about by BT had also resulted in automatic refunds going out to about 600,000 people who had not previously claimed them under the old system. With only a little tidying up left to do, including migrating some ‘legacy’ data, IR chief executive Naomi Ferguson said that the cost of the Business Transformation (BT) project was likely to come in at a little under $1.5 billion, including staff and other internal and consulting costs. The phased switch to a new software system built by US company Fast Enterprises called Start has gone hand-in-hand with tax rules designed to ensure people and businesses are taxed more accurately through the year, and has seen IR’s workforce shrink from 5662 in June 2016 to fewer than 4000 today. On Wednesday, contractor Unisys unplugged the mainframe computers at its data centres in Auckland and on the Kapiti Coast that ran the tax system for more than 20 years.

Some of Inland Revenue's decommissioned First computer system, that has now been switched off.īusiness groups have joined Inland Revenue in labelling the public sector’s biggest-ever computer project a success, after IR switched off its First computer system following a five-year transition to new technology.

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