The Taxpayers' Union is calling on IRD to be lenient and pursue Westpac, not small business owners, after thousands of Westpac One customers were affected by yesterday's eight-hour outage on the same day PAYE employer deductions for the August period were due.
"Yesterday, we received reports that many Westpac business customers were unable to pay their 20ths or PAYE due to timeout errors on its Westpac One site from about 11am," says Jordan Williams, Executive Director of the Taxpayers' Union. "It appears the system only came back online at about 8pm last night."
"We checked with IRD's business helpline and apparently many business taxpayers were proactively contacting IRD asking what they should do. The answer was nothing."
"Taxpayers should not be penalised for something that is no fault of their own. If anyone should take the hit, it should be Westpac. How is it that Westpac's system can go down for eight hours and it doesn't even bother to issue a statement, make a system status announcement on social media, or contact customers?"
"Maybe Westpac hoped no one would notice. That's a shameful approach given the anxiety business owners faced trying to fulfil their tax obligations through no fault of their own."
Thousands of businesses likely late on PAYE payments through no fault of their own
Do you like this post?
