IRD Plays Down Growing Customer Data Leakages

The NZR finds that IRD does not know how many customers have been impacted by privacy breaches, the types of breaches, or how they were handled, over the past 5 years.

On top of the Meta data leak, Inland Revenue has admitted to overseeing 231 additional privacy breaches during the 2024 tax year.

Pip Knight, IRD’s Service Leader for Marketing and Communications/ Source: LinkedIn profile.

Despite stating “Most recorded breaches were minimal or minor”, in a seemingly contradictory statement, Knight wrote that it could not tell The NZR how many people had been affected, the nature of the breaches, or the actions taken to deal with the breaches over the past 5 years.

In November, it admitted to mistakenly providing Meta (Facebook’s owner) with data, identifying more than 200,000 customers.

Data obtained from the IRD shows this single breach was not the only one and that in fact there were 231 other breaches.