IRD staff turnover at nearly 34 per cent in Wellington

Morale at IRD appears to be at an all-time low with staff churn at the Wellington base hitting almost 34 per cent in the past year, Labour’s Revenue spokesperson David Clark says.

New figures show staff turnover at IRD was 33.7 per cent in Wellington, 28.4 per cent in Auckland and 24.7 per cent in Palmerston North in the past year.

“With an exodus like that morale at IRD is clearly at rock bottom. Losing a third of your workforce in a year in the main centre is a shocking indictment on an organisation.

“Inland Revenue is a department in crisis-mode. In just 12 months it has left one million tax returns unprocessed, failed to collect another $7 billion in tax and been responsible for breaches of over 6,300 people’s privacy. No wonder so many people are leaving.

“Peter Dunne needs to get out of his ministerial office and find out what’s going wrong at his department.

“His first priority should be to set out a proper timeline and plan to reform the department’s 20-year-old computer system. Problems in the FIRST computers are putting huge pressure on the organisation but all we’ve seen from Mr Dunne is an attempt to push accountability for addressing the issues to ‘over the next ten years’.

“No one in the Government knows what is going on with IRD’s failing systems. John Key calls it a ‘pig of a system’ but says it will cost $1.5 billion to fix. Bill English says it will cost $700 million. Peter Dunne can’t answer a straight question on it.

“No wonder people are leaving the department in droves. It’s time for Peter Dunne to step in,” said David Clark.