What you need to know: Inland Revenue shutdown period in NZ

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As you may have heard, Inland Revenue will be offline from 3pm on Thursday 18th April until 8am Friday 26th April – a period that covers both Easter and ANZAC public holidays. This includes all online MyIR portals, offices, and call centres, while they switch over to new systems as part of their Business Transformation project.

What does this mean for you? If you are GST registered, pay employees, or are an accountant or bookkeeper, you will not be able to access any IR services during this time. We’ve outlined the impact on you as a Xero user below:

GST

If you are GST registered and use Xero, you’ll be preparing and eFiling your GST returns through Xero. Xero will still be online throughout this period, so you can still prepare and finalise your GST returns as you normally would. The final step of eFiling your GST return with IR will not be possible during the offline period, so you’ll need to complete this step once systems are back online on 26 April. Any GST returns for a period ending 31 March will be due for filing with IR by 7 May, so make sure you file your returns by this date to avoid late fees and interest.

Payroll

If you use Xero Payroll, you can continue to post your pay runs and pay your employees during this period. With payday filing, we will automatically queue your payday filing details – so you can rest assured that these will be processed for you once IR is back online. With payday filing, details usually need to be submitted to IR within 2 days of the pay run so this will be extended to 29 April for any pay runs posted during the offline period.

Don’t forget that your last Employee Monthly Schedules (EMSs) for March is due by 20 April so get these filed before the 18 April shut-down to avoid late fees and interest.

Tax

Accountants & bookkeepers who use Xero Tax will also be affected by the offline period. You can continue to prepare and file income tax returns and GST returns during this period, and the eFiling of these returns will be queued and submitted once the systems are back online on 26 April.

Any AIM provisional tax returns will not be able to eFiled during the offline period and will need to be posted once systems are back online.

We strongly recommend that all provisional notices are finalised and sent before Thursday 18 April. Once myIR is back online, we will download, verify and process all the migrated transactions. We expect this work to take up to a week (until 3 May). While Xero Tax will remain online throughout this time period, we cannot guarantee the integrity of our payment calculations as all Income Tax calculations will need to be recalculated using START data.

For more information, head over to Inland Revenue’s website.

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