Latest / Best of Business / Tony Morris: Inland Revenue spokesperson on the IRD taking money from people's bank accounts

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

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk zed B.
• 0:12
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  Speaker 2: Now. It turns out Inland Revenue is going hard on
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  Speaker 2: collecting outstanding tech attacks to the extent of taking money
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  Speaker 2: out of bank accounts. Seventeen million bucks has been recovered
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  Speaker 2: from more than eight thousand bank account deductions so far,
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  Speaker 2: and Tony Morris is Inland Revenue customer segment leader. Hi Tony, Hi, Heather,
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  Speaker 2: I'm thanking yeah, thanks very much for joining us. How
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  Speaker 2: many times do you try to get in touch before
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  Speaker 2: you start making these withdraws.
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  Speaker 3: In this particular case, we're going to have a couple
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  Speaker 3: of goes. We'll have a first call, then leave a message,
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  Speaker 3: and we might try one more contact and then we
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  Speaker 3: can look to take the money straight out of the
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  Speaker 3: bank accounts. But that's in this campaign we're doing. But
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  Speaker 3: other times we might just contact people once or twice
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  Speaker 3: and then take care money out of their accounts.
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  Speaker 2: And this is not like, to be fair, this is
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  Speaker 2: not your average debt like this is. This is debt
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  Speaker 2: that's been owed for six months to five years, isn't it?
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  Speaker 3: Yep? Yep it is. And you know it's all sorts
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  Speaker 3: of different sizes of the debt we get, but largely
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  Speaker 3: at this time we're focusing on GST and PA WAY
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  Speaker 3: and employer a debt. But it's something that we use
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  Speaker 3: us GOUTE often and with individual customers we often can
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  Speaker 3: take money out of their wages, go to the employer,
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  Speaker 3: take money at the wages. But in this case, in
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  Speaker 3: the businesses, we tend to go straight to the banks
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  Speaker 3: where we know there's money in their bank accounts.
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  Speaker 2: What's the largest amount you've taken out?
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  Speaker 3: And one off, I couldn't tell you exactly what the
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  Speaker 3: amount would be, but we can take quite sizable. So
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  Speaker 3: it's depending on how much money they've got got on
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  Speaker 3: the back.
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  Speaker 2: How do you strike to balance there, Tony, Because I mean,
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  Speaker 2: you obviously don't want to clean out everything because it
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  Speaker 2: might it might it might have you know, quite negative consequences.
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  Speaker 2: So how much do you take out?
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  Speaker 3: Well, we generally take out one hundred percent of that
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  Speaker 3: love to take out one hundred percent of the debt,
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  Speaker 3: so in some cases that might be pretty close to
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  Speaker 3: all the money or more. But I mean again, we've
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  Speaker 3: tried to contact the people fest and all we want
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  Speaker 3: them to do is to get in contact with us
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  Speaker 3: so we can set up some installment arrangements. But yeah,
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  Speaker 3: we do tend to look at the amount of tax,
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  Speaker 3: so that can be whether it's a smaller amount, you know,
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  Speaker 3: down the ten grand, or whether it's a bigger amount.
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  Speaker 3: We'll look to take what we can.
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  Speaker 2: Now, how did we get to the point where we
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  Speaker 2: have debt that's O that's five years old? Is this
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  Speaker 2: is this specific? Like did we go extra softly during
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  Speaker 2: COVID or is this kind of normal?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, we did go. We did go soft down COVID
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  Speaker 3: then just to try and keep people going so the
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  Speaker 3: deck can grow. But we've always had it where deck
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  Speaker 3: can grow and go past five years. Sometimes it's just
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  Speaker 3: extended times that people get in debt and we might
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  Speaker 3: set up in storming arrangements and try to help them through,
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  Speaker 3: and then it all just falls over to what's then
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  Speaker 3: and we've run to that debt sort of gets past
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  Speaker 3: two years old, it sort of becomes hard for people
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  Speaker 3: to pay, you know, and it almost becomes that it
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  Speaker 3: just sort of grows with interest in penalties. And sometimes
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  Speaker 3: once we get past that too, you know, we're really
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  Speaker 3: looking at and solvent toy your liquidations which can take
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  Speaker 3: some one but but I can't get up to five
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  Speaker 3: years or more. But in this case I free. You
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  Speaker 3: can see people have the money and the banks we'll
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  Speaker 3: still to go after up to five years.
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  Speaker 2: Interesting, Tony, thanks very much, appreciate it. Tony Morris, Inland
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  Speaker 2: Revenue Customer Segment Leader.
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