KEY POINTS:
The new Commissioner of Inland Revenue, Bob Russell, has a message for taxpayers. It's part advice and part plea.
"If you need to call us, don't call us on a Monday. Mondays are brutal. People work on their taxes over the weekend, then we get a spike in calls on Monday," the affable Canadian says.
And people have to deal with Inland Revenue on many more matters than tax.
It handles Working for Families, child support and student loans.
It will also be the agency which receives KiwiSaver payments and passes them on to fund managers.
"We used to think that putting more and more information on to the web would divert calls," says Russell. "But often it just means people call with more complicated questions.
"And the better you get at answering the phone, the more people call you so it's hard to get ahead of it."
Making things as easy as possible for the broad mass of taxpayers who want to do the right thing is fundamental to a tax system that depends on voluntary compliance.
"If people feel we don't answer the phone promptly enough, they will say 'Well I tried to get through to them to figure out what I should do, but bugger them, I'm not going to worry'."
When Russell's predecessor, David Butler, took office, perceptions of the IRD were at a low ebb.
"Now the surveys tell us that New Zealanders trust us and on the whole think we are doing a good job and treating them well," says Russell. "But you can always get better and you can never let your guard down on that."
The taxman will never be a beloved figure.
Says Russell: "I have heard people in senior management roles in tax administration say that if everybody liked us it would probably be a sign that we weren't doing our job.
"Tax law is very complicated. Child support is very emotional. Student loans present a set of unique challenges. It's inevitable when you are dealing with everybody - and we are - that you are always going to have some people who aren't as happy as you would like them to be."
Russell joined IRD from Canada eight months ago, and got the top job a month ago.
The athletic 55-year-old is sometimes to be seen running around the Wellington waterfront.
Come August next year, he may be in a bigger capital. Two of his four sons have a shot at representing Canada in canoeing at the Beijing Olympics.
With master's degrees in urban planning and business administration, he was a public servant in Canada for 30 years, the last nine at the Canada Revenue Agency, before coming to New Zealand - "a country I had always been curious about but had never been to".
He now heads an organisation with more than 5000 staff and a $600 million operating budget.
"One of the big challenges is that New Zealand is an OECD economy and people expect to be able, for example, to go to the IRD website and do just as much as an Australian could do on the [Australian Tax Office] website," he says.
"We have to deal with the same big four accounting firms. We have to deal with multinationals that are looking for tax-saving opportunities all over the world. And we have to do that with 5000 employees. In Canada they have 45,000. So we have to play at an A level with a much smaller organisation."
The IRD's roles in social policy delivery are not unusual for a modern tax authority, he says, because they tend to be good at programmes that handle a large number of transactions.
"We already have a lot of information that is sensitive. A lot of social programmes tend to be income-linked. If you go to us you don't have to worry about compromising the secrecy of that information or having to ask customers to furnish it a second time."
Its latest challenge, being a clearing house for KiwiSaver money, will be "huge", Russell says.
But it is only part of an ambitious agenda.
"We want to offer more and more services on line. We want to rebuild the student loan system. The list goes on.
"The international tax environment keeps changing. We need to stay abreast of what is happening in Australia and elsewhere so that we protect our tax base and so that we make it as competitive as possible for companies that are based here."
A sore point at the big end of town is that the department is no longer giving non-binding opinions - a traditional source of comfort for corporate taxpayers at the frontiers of tax law.
"The problem with a non-binding opinion is that it is pretty hard to back away from it," Russell says.
"It sort of became a binding opinion but one which hadn't seen the same rigour [as a binding ruling].
"So what we have tried to do is improve the turnaround when people ask for a binding ruling.
"And we have moved the more routine and less complex ones out of the office of the chief tax counsel and put them into our mainstream service delivery mode, the biggest part of the organisation, so we can handle those volumes. Our turnaround times aren't too bad in there."
Measurable indicators of performance loom large in managing an organisation such as the IRD - the time it takes to issue a binding ruling, or answer the phone, or the ratio of staff to taxpayers and other "customers".
A key measure is the administrative cost of collecting $100 of tax. It has fallen from $1.17 in 2002, which was similar to comparable countries' tax authorities, to 77c.
"It's not absolutely comparable because tax rates are different and different authorities have different responsibilities other than tax, but you can track how it is trending and in our case it is trending down. By any measure it is pretty good."
The IRD has 65 numerical performance targets. It is meeting 49 of them.
"So it's not as simple as if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We can do better."
Russell is struck by how often tax issues make the news in New Zealand.
But as he fulfils an intention to get out and about more, don't bother trying to draw him on the subject of, say, a capital gains tax on investment properties.
"That's a matter for ministers," he said, flashing his ready smile.
Bob Russell
Commissioner and chief executive, Inland Revenue.
* Age: 55
* Home: Wellington and Halifax, Nova Scotia.
* Family: Married with four sons.
* Education: Bachelor's degrees in science and education, master's degrees in business administration and in urban and regional planning.
* Career: More than 30 years in the public service in Canada, including with the Canada Revenue Agency, Industry Canada and Energy, Mines and Resources Canada.
* Away from work: A keen runner and cyclist.
