@4wd: Yes, the Ozzies were arguably ahead of the game. In the NZ IRD project, the designers/planners had looked to other examples of innovation in the tax system in different countries, and one good example had been Australia's. (The decision had already been taken to use XML as the Common Reporting Standard.)

The background to the project would have included these objectives and benefits:
The Standard Business Reporting (SBR) Programme would eventually transform the manually intensive AS-IS government-mandated processes for collecting data from businesses, to enable a more automated TO-BE process.
In considering the SBR Programme, the New Zealand government would be in line with international developments – for example, where Australia, the Netherlands and the UK are well advanced in the development and implementation of SBR.
This would be a whole-of-government programme using technology to reduce reporting burdens for business by eliminating unnecessary or duplicated reporting to separate government agencies – typically IR, ACC, Statistics.
SBR would provide options for increased automation of business reporting, including greater pre-population of forms.
The broad areas of benefit that would be provided by SBR are:
•   Reducing the number of different agencies to which businesses have to report directly the same or similar information.
•   Reducing the number of data elements that businesses report to government, through standardising and harmonising data definitions and eliminating duplication.
•   Reducing the cost of intermediaries to business, currently necessitated by the need to operate a more manual and duplicative process.
•   Improving cost-efficiency of the SBR process, through increased automation.
...etc.

I could be wrong, of course, but in the Intuit case in the US, those types of "no-brainer" objectives/benefits for the nation's taxpayers would seem to have been nowhere in sight. If it was not benefitting the taxpayers, then one has to wonder to whose $benefit that ultimately might have been...  :tellme:

@holt:
EDIT 2020-01-09: Just pointing out that the above video is a repeat from the post you made earlier:

Another whistle-blower exposee, reporting shabby workmanship, about a completely different airliner, also manufactured by Boeing, the company whose aircraft never crash, they just go 'boeing-boeing':
Boeing 787 Broken Dreams
"Our journalism reveals the deeply-held safety concerns of current and former Boeing engineers, who in some cases fear to fly on the 787, the plane they build. We uncover allegations of on-the-job drug use, quality control problems and poor workmanship."

-holt (April 13, 2019, 06:22 PM)

@holt: [Regarding that video.] Yup. A while back, I met an engineer (retired ex Boeing, at a conference in Australia) who wished to remain anonymous, but said that the Dreamliner design was aerodynamically very sound - including the performance of carbon fibre in construction - but that Boing had effectively ensured that their incompetence and disregard for engineering build quality, safety and compliance, coupled with an emasculated and now servile FAA puppet, would kill the plane - which it did - what a surprise (NOT). He said, from an engineering perspective, it was predictable, but the management seemed to be blinded by greed and a seemingly psychopathic disregard for the safety of others.
He also said that the Al Jazeera video made a good point about the trouble seeming to stem from the point in 1997 when MacDonnel Douglas and Boeing merged. After that point, he reckoned, there was an increasing statistical probability that each new Boeing product could be a potential death-trap, and time seems to have shown that to be the case.
The engineer advised me to avoid Boeing planes, for my own safety. I still use flight insurance, but I won't fly on a Boeing aircraft now and I won't book flights for my family members on them either. I'd rather have a living wife, son, or daughter than a fat paycheck as compensation for their loss of life.