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IR/Justice Fines Defaulters Tracing Programme

• Annual report
• Technical information
• System description
• Historical activity

Annual report

Purpose: To enable the Ministry of Justice locate people who have outstanding fines, in order to enforce payment.

Year commenced: 2002

Features: Data transferred up to 12 times a year by CD.

Justice disclosure to IR: Justice selects fines defaulters for whom it has been unable to find a current address, and sends the full name, date of birth and Justice unique identifier number to IR.

IR disclosure to Justice: For matched records, IR supplies address and contact details along with the unique identifier information originally provided by Justice.

2008/09 activity:

Match runs 7
Records sent for matching 129,476
Possible matches identified          36,129
Notices of adverse action[1] 23,102
Challenges 50
Successful challenges 22
Collection instituted 10,174
Amount paid or settled[2] $5,905,868      

Commentary: There were significantly fewer records sent for matching during the 2008/09 year than previously (129,476 compared with 343,200 in 2007/08). Justice believes this was because more fine defaulter records were already under other tracing action and therefore not available for matching.

Compliance: Compliant

Technical information

Information matching provision Tax Administration Act 1994, s.85A
Year authorised 1998
Programme type Locating people
Unique identifiers Personal Profile Number

System description

Justice selects names from its fines defaulter records where it thinks that matching with IR may provide useful new contact information for a person whose whereabouts are otherwise unknown. The selection excludes people where a recent match with IR has already been tried. Justice sends full name, date of birth, and unique identifier information about the selected fines defaulters to IR for comparison with taxpayer records. IR then attempts to match on the basis of last name, first name, second name, and date of birth.

For matched records, IR supplies Justice a CD containing details of client address, address date and telephone numbers, along with the unique identifier information originally provided by Justice. Each match record supplied by IR includes a match indicator code that represents how well the records matched.

Historical activity

  2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08
Match runs 9 8 13 11
Records sent for matching 357,312 307,230 474,709 343,200
Possible matches identified
(addresses)		 87,396 82,075 128,259 102,955
Notices of adverse action 87,969 81,305 128,227 97,152
Challenges 62 55 83 81
Successful challenges 49 41 62 53
Collection instituted 36,448 29,666 43,033 35,036
Amount paid/remitted $26,950,372 $22,925,078 $37,765,080 $33,059,260
% of useable addresses where
collection was instituted		 42% 36% 34% 34%
 

[1] An enhancement to reporting from 1/7/2008 means that Justice now records the actual number of letters sent rather than the number of people eligible to be sent a notice.
[2] This is an ‘in-progress' figure because payments are attributed to this programme for 12 months after the match run date. Final collection figures will be published on our website when they become available.