The FastTrack360 NZ Payday filing release was made commercially available on March 20, 2019, following a 6-week BETA program with limited customers. Throughout this process, FastTrack has been in active discussion and consultation with the IRD about the proposed Payday filing solution, following the successful release of Australian Taxation Office's Single Touch Payroll reporting to FastTrack360 customers.

In the BETA process, three known issues were identified with the IRD's software solution which will impact FastTrack360 customers ability to complete Payday filing successfully. These issues were raised with the IRD. The IRD confirmed in a phone conference on March 21, 2019, that these known issues would not be resolved before the legislation of Payday filing on April 1, 2019.

Below is a summary of the known issues.

Issue 1 - Payday filing period end date (Return Submission)

IRD won’t accept a Return submission from FastTrack360 where the filing period end date isn’t aligned to the end of the month, which is due to an issue with IRD filing period end date validation process within gateway services.

All FastTrack360 customers will be required to submit the pay batches with a filing period end date relating to the end of the month in which the payment dates fall, until such time that the IRD confirm that this has been rectified in their software. The reporting of the pay periods into the relevant month filing period that is 1-15 and 16-31 will still be applied correctly within the myIR portal. Customers should continue to pay tax as per the current processes (i.e. monthly or twice monthly) as this process will remain unaffected.

Example 1

Pay Period End Date: 03/03/2019
Payment Date: 07/03/2019
Manual Period Filing End Date to be applied by FastTrack360 customers: 31/03/2019

Example 2

Period End Date: 17/03/2019
Payment Date: 21/03/2019
Manual Period Filing End Date to be applied by FastTrack360 customers: 31/03/2019

Example 3

Period End Date: 24/02/2019
Payment Date: 01/03/2019
Manual Period Filing End Date to be applied by FastTrack360 customers: 31/03/2019

If FastTrack360 customers send a submission with filing period end date as 15th of the month, they will receive a submission status of 'Rejected' within FastTrack360 due to this issue. When customers send a submission file with filing period end date as last day of the month, they will receive a submission status of 'Completed' within FastTrack360.

FastTrack360 customers can log in to the myIR portal after one business day and verify that their filing period end date is correct in the Employment Information section.

Issue 2 - Payee update (Payee Submission)

On submission of a pay batch to the IRD, all FastTrack360 customers will receive an error code '101' with any updates for existing payees due to a known issue on the IRD payee submission screen. All FastTrack360 customers should ignore this error as the relationship between the existing payees, and the employer has already been established. Should there be a change that does relate to the payee that must be updated within the IRD systems, then it is suggested that FastTrack360 customers update directly in the myIR portal. FastTrack will advise customers to resubmit these payees once this issue is resolved within IRD systems.

All new payees set up in FastTrack360 post-payday reporting go-live (March 20, 2019) will be set up correctly in the IRD systems. This issue only occurs with existing payees. When successful the Submission Status message 'Completed' will be returned by the IRD within FastTrack360.

Issue 3 – Terminations (Payee Submission)

The IRD will reject the submission of terminated employees via the payee search tab on the Payday reporting screen in FastTrack360. This process should not be utilised at this time. The IRD have advised they will pick up the employee termination via the data within the pay batch submission. Attempting to use this function, will receive the below error message within FastTrack360.

Issue 4 - myIR (Tax Withholding) balance

The IRD has acknowledged there's an issue affecting the ‘Summary of filed schedules’ in myIR where incorrect balances are displayed. In some cases this is causing employers to pay us incorrect deductions.

The IRD advise they are investigating the issue as a matter of urgency. In the meantime, they recommend customers use functionality within their software to determine the deductions to pay the IRD. As an alternative, the IRD advise customers add up each employment information submission (either within or month or twice a month) to determine the deductions to pay the IRD.

Based on the IRD's feedback, FastTrack recommend all customers use the IR345 report that's available in FastTrack360 to determine the deductions to be paid to the IRD. We will keep you posted with any changes on this issue once we receive further updates from the IRD.