Inland Revenue is trialling a new service that would see Baycorp contact some people to help manage their tax debt.
IR currently isn’t able to contact some people one-to-one without the help of a third party and would be using Baycorp to contact around 3000 people with a tax debt of under $5000.
“We want to try to stop penalties and interest piling up on people and we also want to continue to find cost-effective ways to collect tax from those who owe it,” spokesperson Jane Elley said.
The pilot begins today and will be running for five months.
Baycorp has been used to collect student loans from overseas for a number of years and Elley said privacy concerns had been considered.
“We’re confident in the steps they have in place to protect taxpayer privacy.
“They will contact customers [email, SMS, and phone], confirm the debt, and promote IR’s self-service options, taking the customer through these steps.”
Elley said there may be concerns about scam messages and calls so if there are any worries about the authenticity of the caller, people can call IR on 0800775247 to confirm.
There will be no requests for any credit card details, threats, links or password queries from Baycorp when is contacting people.
The information being shared will be the person’s full name, date of birth, contact details, tax type, last contact date and last payment date, amount and how it was made (no account details provided).
Debt will remain with IR and Baycorp will not be able to use the information it receives for credit rating purposes.
