More than 4,000 New Zealanders may have paid incorrect tax after Inland Revenue admitted a fault in its myIR system that caused imputation credits on jointly owned shareholdings to be cut in half when automatically pre-populated into IR3 returns.
The issue, discovered by a taxpayer who manually checked his figures and found he and his wife could have lost about $20,000 in credits, affected around 4,500 people who filed without correcting the error. Inland Revenue says the mistake has now been fixed for returns started after 26 November and that the average discrepancy is about $300 per person, all in taxpayers’ favour.
Deloitte tax partner Robyn Walker told state-funded media the failure undermines trust in a system people are expected to rely on and warned that many taxpayers may accept pre-filled data without checking it against source documents.
IRD is now determining the best way to amend affected returns and will contact impacted customers once a solution is in place.
