Tony Morris: Inland Revenue spokesperson on the IRD taking money from people's bank accounts

The IRD is set to be cracking down harder on those who don't pay their taxes properly, and they've unveiled new measures for people who ignore correspondence.

The department will start taking money out of people's bank accounts if they owe over a certain amount - and they've recovered at least $17 million so far.

The IRD's Tony Morris says they aim to phone people at least twice before they start directly taking money out of accounts.

"Other times, we might just contact people once or twice and then take money out of their accounts so they don't squander it." 

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now it turns out Inland Revenue is going hard on
collecting outstanding tech attacks to the extent of taking money
out of bank accounts. Seventeen million bucks has been recovered
from more than eight thousand bank account deductions so far.
And Tony Morris is Inland Revenue Customer segment leader. Hi Tony, Hi, Heather,
I thank having, yeah, thanks very much for joining us.
How many times do you try to get in touch

(00:20):
before you start making these withdrawals?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
In this particular case, we're going to have a couple
of goes. We'll have a first call, then leave a message,
and we might try one more contact and then we
can look to take the money straight out of the
bank accounts. But that's in this campaign we're doing. But
other times we might just contact people once or twice
and then take money out of their accounts.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
And this is not, like to be fair, this is
not your average debt like this is. This is debt
that's been owed for six months to five years, isn't it?

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yep? Yep it is? And you know it's all sorts
of different sizes of the debt we get. But largely
at this time we're focusing on GST and pa Way debt,
but it's something that we use used quite often, and
with individual customers we often can take money out of
their wages, going to employer take money other wages. But
in this case the businesses, we tend to go straight

(01:11):
to the banks where we know there's money in their
bank accounts.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
What's the largest amount you've taken out?

Speaker 2 (01:17):
And one off, I couldn't tell you exactly what the
amount would be, but we can take quite sizable. So
it's depending on how much money they've got got on
the back.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
How do you strike to balance there, Tony, Because I mean,
you obviously don't want to clean out everything because it
might it might it might have you know, quite negative consequences.
So how much do you take out?

Speaker 2 (01:35):
We well, we generally take out one hundred percent of
that love to take out one hundred percent of the debt.
So in some cases that might be pretty close to
all the money or a lot more. But I mean again,
we've tried to contact the people fest and all we
want them to do is to get in contacts with
us so we can set up some installment arrangements. But yeah,
we do tend to look at the amount of tech

(01:56):
so that can be whether it's a smaller amount, you know,
down ten grand, or whether it's a bigger amount. We'll
look to take what we can.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Now, how did we get to the point where we
have debt that's O that's five years old? This is
this specific like did we go extra softly during COVID
or is this kind of normal?

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yeah, we did go. We did go soft drink COVID
just to try and keep people going so the deck
can grow. But we've always had it where deck can
grow and go past five years. Sometimes it's just extended
times that people get in debt and we might set
up in storm and arrangements and try to help them through,
and then it all just falls over towards then and

(02:34):
we've fun to that debt sort of gets past two
years old, it sort of becomes hard for people to pay,
you know, and it almost becomes that it just sort
of grows with interest in penalties. And sometimes once we
get past that too, you know, we're really looking at
and solvent to your liquidations, which can take some time,
but it can get up to five years or more.

(02:55):
But in this case, if we can see people have
the money and the paying workst all up to go
after apup to five years.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Interesting, Tony, thanks very much, appreciate it. Tony Morris, Inland
Revenue Customer segment leader. For more from Heather Duplessy Allen Drive,
Listen live to news talks. It'd be from four pm weekdays,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio