COMMISSIONER OF TAXES

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29068, 3 December 1959, Page 9

COMMISSIONER OF TAXES

Mr Rowntree To Retire Mr N. A. Rowntree, District Commissioner of Taxes in Christchurch since 1948, will retire next month on completion of 40 years with the Public Service, all of them with the Inland Revenue Department. Mr Rowntree will leave his office on December 21 for leave before retirement. A tax collector is frequently vilified and tax collectors admit that their work sometimes, upsets the taxpayer; but those who have had dealings with Mr Rowntree are ready to admit that a tax collector can retain a lively good humour, sympathy and understanding. Mr Rowntree has seen a tremendous growth in the work of the department and the staff whose duty it is to take from the people the money with which to run the country. When he joined the department in 1920 as a cadet in Wellington, the whole staff for New Zealand was only about 100. Today there are 200 employees in the Christchurch office alone, and about 1700 for the whole of New Zealand.

In the 1920’s there was a basic tax rate of 7d in the £ with a maximum of 4s 6d in the £, and no social security, Mr Rowntree

said. Today there was the complicated P.A.Y.E. system of different deductions for a wide range of taxpayers. When Mr Rowntree began work and? right up to 1946, all the staff of the Inland Revenue Department, or Land and Income Tax Department as it used to be called, worked in Wellington. In 1946 there was decentralisation, and offices were established in the main centres. Since then there has been a further spreading of the department’s offices. Until he came to Christchurch two years after the decentralisation, Mr Rowntree worked in the head office, except for four years up to 1938 when he was "on the road” as an inspector, being stationed in Wanganui for some time. The last two years have been as complicated as any in Mr Rowntree's long service, for as the district executive head he had to supervise the introduction of a new system of tax collection with all its intricacies and early anomalies.

Mr Rowntree hopes to spend his retirement in Christchurch—“but the family have some say in it,” he adds cautiously—and he will now have more time to devote to his favourite sport of golf.