I wish the IRD would think a little more some times
An email I sent to the IRD today…
I visited the IRD website this afternoon to use the PAYE 2009 calculator but found that it was not yet obviously* available. After calling the IRD call centre I was informed that the calculator was going to be made available on 1 April. The only solution was to use the pdf 2009 tables or the printed table that the business has already received.
As a business that pays employees monthly in advance, it would be nice to have the calculator made available in advance of 1 April so that I can calculate using the new tables those payments for the month of April that go out on 1 April in late March. The tool is particularly useful in that it can also be used to produce pdf’s that I can email to employees to show them how their monthly salary payments are going to change in the new tax year.
It is useful to be able to use the calculator in March in advance of the changes to payments made on 1 April, and to me it seems a poor decision to leave the roll-out of the PAYE 2009 calculator until the period has actually started. Many organisations need to utilise the tool IN ADVANCE of the new tax period starting.
* Upon further digging, it appears that the PAYE 2009 calculator is available, but it is not obviously linked. One has to select the PAYE 2008 calculator, and then select for the 1 April 2008 – 31 March 2009 period. Unfortunately your call centre staff were not aware of this solution when I called.
Can I suggest that in future that the new years PAYE calculator is clearly rolled out on your website at sometime in the first couple of weeks of March, and linked as the others on this page.
So one can do the calculations, but the tool isn’t clearly and obviously linked on their website. It is a little thing, but it is important to make these tools easily accessible and in a timely manner. It took me 30 minutes by the time I had surfed the website, called the IRD call centre, and eventually found the tool that should have been easily linked in the first place. Their call centre staff should at least have been able to point me to the work-around I found.