Good morning,

We have now reached the end of the 19/20 financial year!  In these rather surreal times, we hope that you are keeping safe.
The team are managing well – we are almost fully operational and ironing out the glitches and look forward to working with you in this new financial year.

Link to Questionnaires:
The time has come for us to send you our 2020 Questionnaires and the link is below.  These are available on our website in either word or PDF versions so you can choose if you would like to fill them out online and email them to us or print them and fill out by hand.
We understand and appreciate that for some clients nothing has changed from the previous year, but we now have an obligation to have all our clients complete and return questionnaires, but also the things that IRD are interested in are changing, and if we don’t check in with you, and let you know what they are now looking for, we are not doing the best job for you.
As always, we are here to assist if you need any help with completing these.
https://www.millerjohnson.co.nz/free-resources/client-questionnaires/

IRD outage:
In just over a week, IRD will be making some system changes to make tax more straightforward.  This will include improvements to myIR, student loans, KiwiSaver and more.
IRD have worked hard to identify the best time to complete this work and have taken into consideration filing dates and avoiding disruption around the 7 April due date.  As a result, from 3pm Thursday 9 April to 8am Thursday 16 April, myIR secure online services will be unavailable and IRD’s phone lines will be closed.

NB!!  This upgrade will affect any drafts that you have in myIR, so if you have a return or eFile in draft or any draft messages, these will be deleted.  Be sure you complete and submit these before Thursday 9 April, so you don’t lose them.
Please make sure you file any returns outside of the planned outage dates.

COVID-19:
Please read our COVID-19 updates – we are aiming to give you all the information you need and we’re more than happy to assist if you have any further queries.
We have already indicated in our separate COVID-19 updates that Inland Revenue have advised they will not charge interest or penalties on late-paid revenues. They ask you not to contact them, but we do ask you to let us know if you do not make payments as they fall due. Please continue to file returns, even if you do not make the revenue payments.

Tax due 7 May 2020:
We are aware that many clients will want to revisit the final instalment of 2020 provisional tax which is payable on 7 May. Our team have begun working on 31 March 2020 GST returns and we will complete these, and 2020 accounts and tax returns in the order that they come in.  As always, we will also prioritise those clients who have a genuine need for urgent accounts.

Audit Shield:
A note to all those clients that have opted to take out an Audit Shield policy for this year.  You are now covered should the IRD initiate any audit activity on you or any of your entities.  One tends to think that an “audit” is a major investigation, but it could be as insignificant as the IRD calling us to request further information.  This takes time and if you have an Audit Shield policy, we will be able to initiate a claim so that you don’t have to pay our fees for the time spent.

The three most common audit activity areas are:

• GST verification
• Client Risk Reviews
• Income tax returns

For a major audit, your policy will cover our fees, legal fees, bookkeeping fees and any other specialist fees that may be incurred while we provide information to IRD and IRD can investigate as far back as 4 years!
Remember, you cannot use your policy if the IRD contacts you direct for further information – it needs to go through us.  So, if they get in touch, direct them to call us and then we will have a good chance of reclaiming fees and time spent from Audit Shield.

That’s it from us for now, stay safe and stay well!

The Team at Miller Johnson