Accountancy firm KPMG are laying claim that the IRD’s behavior in tax disputes is doing more damage than it is good.

According to KPMG the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) is taking an increasingly “tortuous” route in tax dispute cases, leading both individual clientele and large businesses to take a more upstanding or adversarial approach to the IRD than normally.

KPMG is claiming that the IRD’s adjunction (or evidence review) process is so not fit for the purposes that it was intended for that the IRD is self-justifying ignoring the adjunction process all together and bypassing it. Further it claims that the IRD has sought on occasion to attain the confidential advice given by accountants to their clients. This, in KPMG’s view, will eventually lead to damage in New Zealand’s voluntary compliance tax system.