The winners of Inland Revenue’s App4IR challenge, Matt Innes and Josh Lee, have created a design that builds on the government department’s existing myIR service to allow consumers to manage business and personal accounts on different devices.

The design was simple and showed insight into what customers want, says commissioner Naomi Ferguson, adding there were more than 50 submissions for the challenge.

“This is the first time that we have used crowdsourcing,” she says. “Through this we have been able to reach out to such a large number of people and tap into a rich vein of creativity and innovation.”

Many submissions made clever use of the capability of mobile devices to make it easier to do business and to work with Inland Revenue, Ferguson says.

“The current app is a great first step but is only available to individual customers and we want to provide more services and greater usability to small businesses.”

The challenge also helps Inland Revenue’s mission to make services more accessible, she says.

“People want to do business with us the same way as they would with any other business and using their tablets and smartphones. Our services need to be more cost effective as well and this challenge is one innovative way of making that happen.”