TV1 spin on harrassed IRD employee’s protest car crash action, New Zealand Aug 2009


cryptome.org indymedia.org.nz I’m a long time Inland Revenue NZ employee of 20 years I have many frustrations with incompetent managers, absolute waste of taxpayer money, illiterate team leaders ( ‘waist bin’ in team minutes is not a typo, it’s a spelling mistake), a workplace bully, Carol Buckenham, who has had extraordinary protection, even by my union delegates, failed payroll systems, failing tools, and last but not least a tax system which is designed to overdeduct tax, but which the IRD adverts sold as ‘you never have to file a tax return again’ allowing a company to set up a very succesful business giving people back the money the government hoped they wouldn’t claim … There’s also penalising of low income taxpayers but almost no scrutiny of huge refunds going out the door — my job was to check refunds of over $100000 and I was told on Friday to do this at the rate of 9 per hour, if that was the work given to me. In this case it was me the payroll system failed to pay — twice — and they had no idea why and asked me to get a bank statement to prove I wasn’t paid as they thought I had been. Complaints got me nowhere, requests for information got me nowhere and finally four official information requests (our FOIA equivalent) resulted in either no information, or on the last day an extension could be requested in a well-defined form, simply a statement that I’d be charged NZ$38 per half hour, without specifying what would be provided, when, or even whether they’d