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Source: ONE News
Inland Revenue says comments by a former senior manager that its proposed $1 billion-plus investment in a new computer system could let it cut 1000 jobs are ''simply speculation''.
The former manager, who preferred anonymity, said Inland Revenue could shed about a fifth of its 5700 staff and still collect more revenue once it had replaced its First computer system with more modern technology in perhaps 10 years' time.
Moving more transactions online and getting better information to target tax cheats would make the system more efficient.
''If you gave the right tools to the right people, they would be better able to target avoidance, as opposed to sending out investigators and doing audits all over the place and quite often not turning up anything.''
The efficiency of tax authorities varied greatly, he said. Inland Revenue's equivalent in Singapore collected a similar amount of tax with only about 1500 staff. ''The other extreme is America where they need I don't know how many hundred thousand staff.''
An Inland Revenue spokesman said the project to replace First was still at the planning stage and it had not yet determined any impact the investment might have on its organisational structure or staff numbers, so it was ''not possible that any party has informed or credible numbers at this point in time''.
Inland Revenue advised Revenue Minister Peter Dunne in a briefing paper made public last week that it would need to spend between $1 billion and $1.5b to replace its 20 year-old mainframe-based computer system, which has become increasingly difficult to support and adapt.
Dunne said the likely bill came as no surprise, but Computer Society chief executive Paul Matthews said its members had been shocked and the estimate appeared ''massively inflated''.
Inland Revenue's former manager believed the department was taking the right approach in considering replacing First with Oracle's Enterprise Tax Management software suite, and said that project would create many jobs in the short term.
He said $1.5b was ''pushing up a bit high'', but believed spending of $1b spread over 10 years would not be out of the question. As Inland Revenue had already bought licences to Oracle software, most of that would be ''people costs''.
The figure was up on internal estimates of $500m to $600m a few years ago, but the Australian Tax Office had since spent about A$800m ($1 billion) on a similar but still unfinished project to modernise its systems, he said.
