Kiribati was the first country to use UTC+14 after it shifted the International Date Line around its eastern islands in 1994.
Kiribati stretches across the central Pacific and includes the Gilbert, Phoenix, and Line island groups. Before the change, its eastern islands used dates nearly a day behind the western Gilbert Islands, creating serious administrative and communications problems within one country.
On 31 December 1994, Kiribati moved the Phoenix and Line Islands forward across the date line. The Line Islands adopted UTC+14, while the Phoenix Islands adopted UTC+13. This made Kiribati the first country to enter a new calendar day and allowed all its island groups to share the same date.
A common mix-up is confusing the country with Kiritimati, the Line Islands atoll that lies in UTC+14. Samoa has also used very advanced offsets at times, but Kiribati made UTC+14 part of its standard time arrangement after the 1994 change.