How a voluntary KiwiSaver contribution actually reaches your provider

If you have ever tried to put extra money into your KiwiSaver outside of your pay, you may have noticed something odd. The payment does not go to your KiwiSaver provider. It goes to Inland Revenue.

That is not a mistake, and it is not a detour. It is how the system is built.

Inland Revenue sits in the middle

When a payment is made as a KiwiSaver contribution, the payee is Inland Revenue's KiwiSaver account, not your provider's. The payment carries a tax type that tells IRD what it is, and IRD is the party that matches it to you and passes it on.

You do not give anyone your provider's bank details for this. You do not need to know them. Inland Revenue's account is fixed on the sending side, so the only piece of you in the payment is your IRD number.

What IRD actually gets

Less than you would think. The payment that arrives at IRD carries the amount, a tax type that marks it as a KiwiSaver contribution, and your IRD number. That is the whole thing. No account number of yours, no provider name, no reference you had to invent.

Your IRD number is doing all the work. It is how IRD knows whose contribution it is.

Where to find your IRD number

It is on letters from IRD, in myIR, and on a payslip. If you are copying it from myIR it will be shown with hyphens in it, which is fine. The hyphens are display, not part of the number.

An IRD number is eight or nine digits. The last digit is a check digit, worked out from the others, which is what lets a system tell a real IRD number from a typo.

Why a wrong number matters more here than usual

Because your IRD number is the only thing identifying you in the payment, getting it wrong is not like getting a reference wrong on a normal bank transfer.

There are two kinds of wrong. A typo, one digit out, almost always fails that check digit, and a properly built form will reject it before anything is sent. The dangerous kind is a number that is valid but not yours. That passes every check, because it is a real IRD number. It is just somebody else's.

So the one thing worth doing slowly is reading the number back against a letter or myIR before you save it. Nobody on the sending side can tell whether a valid IRD number is actually yours.

What we cannot tell you

A few things about this process happen inside Inland Revenue, and we would rather say so than guess. How long IRD takes to pass a contribution to your provider, how a contribution sent to a valid but wrong IRD number gets untangled, and whether a voluntary contribution is treated any differently from the deductions that come out of your pay are all questions for IRD or your provider. If you need a firm answer on any of them, myIR or your provider is the place, not this page.

Where Reallo fits

Reallo can move money into your KiwiSaver as one of its destinations, and it uses exactly this route. Inland Revenue's account is fixed on our side, the payment is marked as a KiwiSaver contribution, and the only thing we ask you for is your IRD number, which we check for shape and check digit before it is saved. We cannot check that it is yours. That part is on you, and it is why the app makes you look at it twice.

How the rest of a move works is in How Reallo actually works.