Thousands of tax rebates are having to be manually processed which a senior politician says is “taking officers a great deal longer”.
Deputy Gavin St Pier, Vice-President of Policy & Resources, informed States members of the issues yesterday and acknowledged that “the current rate of issuing repayments is not an acceptable level of service to the public”.
He said while over 30,000 tax assessments have been issued between April and July this year, just 1,084 repayments have been made by the Revenue Service.
Over 6,000 “credits” have been generated from this which may lead to a repayment, but these are having to be manually reviewed by staff as the service moves to a new IT system.
Cheques cannot be posted to taxpayers without this validation.
“Despite the repayment process being the highest priority, this manual process is taking officers a great deal longer than would have been the case with the old system, as they are having to familiarise themselves with the way the new systems present the data they need, in order to check and then manually create each repayment,” Deputy St Pier said.
He added that fixing the issue was a top priority for the States, and promised that another update would be provided before the end of the year.
“Meaningful improvement in service levels will be one of the objectives currently being set for the next 12 months for the Chief Executive & Head of the Public Service. This is and will remain a top priority for the Chief Executive, his leadership team and the Committee.”
Deputy St Pier noted that the Revenue Service has gone through “significant change” including combining social security with tax collection and updating a “woefully outdated” computer system.