Tax office completing final steps to transform IT system

Since 2018 the tax office has been undertaking a transformation of its IT services and the current 30-year-old legacy system will soon no longer be supported.

Scott Bloomfield, head of service delivery, said it started the final steps in the transformation to the new IT services in December.

‘This final process involves migrating financial data from the legacy tax and contributions systems into our new services,’ he said.

‘To protect the integrity of the data we placed the legacy systems in a state where only minimal amendments could be made. The majority of income tax processes have continued in the new system during this time, including the issuing of coding notices and the creation of tax assessments.’

There had been rumours that the system was down, but Mr Bloomfield quashed this.

‘At no point have the Revenue Service not had access to its IT systems.’

However, he said the issuing of tax assessments and repayments was put on hold while the migration of financial data was carried out.

‘This was to ensure that tax liabilities were being calculated correctly,’ he said.

‘As a result, any customers that had been informed that a repayment was due prior to the start of the migration of data which had not been processed, will have experienced a delay in receiving their repayment, for which we apologise.’

He added that they had now restarted issuing repayments.

‘We’ve identified 94 customers where a repayment was due, but had not been issued during the period of data migration. In addition, there are 200 customers where compliance checks need to be undertaken to determine whether a repayment is due. These started to be processed during the week just gone.’

Islanders have just one week left to complete their 2023 tax returns, with the deadline on Friday 31 January.

As of 23 January, 27,500 personal tax returns for 2023 had been submitted. But around 40,000 more are expected.