What makes a good tax system and where does New Zealand presently sit?
The current broad-base, low rate approach is under strain. How do we address that? What can we do to keep/ preserve that as far as possible? And more.
Terry Baucher: It is my very great privilege this week to be joined by three of the titans of tax in New Zealand, Rob McLeod, Robin Oliver and Geof Nightingale.
Rob, or more correctly Sir Robert McLeod, KNZM is one of THE gurus of New Zealand tax, has been involved in tax policy at the highest levels since the 1980s. A former chair of EY, he was chair of the 2001 McLeod Tax Review and was also a member of the 2010 Victoria University of Wellington Tax Working Group. He’s currently a consultant, although still very much involved in the tax policy world. He was knighted in 2019 for services to business and Māori. Kia Ora, thank you for joining us.
Robin Oliver, another of the gurus of New Zealand tax, until he retired from Inland Revenue, was Deputy Commissioner of Inland Revenue and head of Tax Policy where he advised the 2001 and 2010 tax working groups. He is now a partner in tax consultancy Oliver Shaw and was a member of the last Tax Working Group. Robin was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2009.
Geof Nightingale recently retired from PwC, and when he’s not cycling the length of the South Island, is an independent tax consultant. He was a member of both the 2010 and 2019 tax working groups. Thank you again to all of you for joining us.
What makes a good tax system and where does New Zealand presently sit?
We’ll begin with what was asked at this year’s International Fiscal Association Conference. The three of you spoke on the topic of what makes a good tax system. What does make a good tax system and where does New Zealand presently sit? Rob, would you like to lead off?
Rob Mcleod (RM) Thanks, Terry. Well, I think at its core tax is mainly about raising revenue to finance government programmes. It’s true that tax has peripheral tasks as well, like you know, correcting for market failure. If we think about carbon taxes, the primary purpose of that kind of tax is really to moderate adverse behaviour in the economy, which is not is not really a revenue raising objective. Some would also argue that taxes are there to achieve redistribution goals, transfer income to those that are in need. That too is not so much a revenue raising goal.
“At its core tax is mainly about raising revenue to finance government programmes”
But if you go to the real reason why income tax exists in countries, it’s actually to raise revenue for governments. If governments didn’t need revenue, you wouldn’t have taxes. And chances are you wouldn’t have such a major regime doing these other two things, like corrective taxation, like carbon taxes, or trying to redistribute income without the agenda of raising revenue. I would argue that we wouldn’t have tax systems on the scale that we have them doing those other things. So, I believe that raising revenue is the primary goal of a good tax system and doing it at least cost would be my formulation.
Robin Oliver (RO) I agree with Rob, even more so, that a good tax system is one that works. It raises money for the government. That may seem obvious to people, but you can’t have taxes which fail to raise money. Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax failed to raise money. It was a failure.
“You’ve got to really focus on raising money at least cost”
So it has to raise money at least cost to society and that’s admin costs, compliance costs, but overall economic costs. The cost of disincentivising people from work and savings and so forth. People think that’s “blah blah blah blah” but the estimates in New Zealand and Australia, and used by the Australian Treasury, is that twenty cents in every dollar of tax is lost in economic costs. In other words, not quite, but basically lost output, lost wealth for the country. So, you’ve got to really focus on raising money at least cost.
Rob mentioned redistribution. I think redistribution’s got nothing to do with a good tax system. Government raises money to do good things – health, education, welfare. We’ve lost focus on what tax is about. We’ve got diverted into all sorts of ideas that it could be used for. No, it’s about raising money, at least cost. Every tax proposal should be looked at “Is this the way we could raise some money, effectively, at least the cost to society.”
TB Thanks, Robin. Geof, I think you have a slightly different take on the redistribution issue and I note that the IMF was talking about redistribution in one of its papers recently
Geof Nightingale (GN) Well, Terry, I’d largely, and violently agree with Rob and Robin that the primary function of a good tax system is to raise the revenue that government needs. But it’s how it goes about that where I might differ.
There’s a couple of backgrounds, opening points I’d like to make, and the first is I think it seems, really uncontroversial that our modern democratic states with tax systems and, you know, rule of law-based things. They’ve done more than anything that’s ever been tried to lift living standards. So, broadly, I think they are a good thing that the tax status policy people might call it is a good thing.
“You can only tax by consent”
The second point is, that in those democracies, it’s really important for tax policy people to acknowledge that you can only tax by consent. I mean we impose taxation through the rule of law and through enforcement. But in the end people vote on taxes and people vote governments in and out and tax is often a key election thing. So you can really only tax by consent.
So, whatever the theory may tell you, you have to – I’ve learned over many years now – bring the public with you. That’s the job of the politicians, not the policy people. The policy people have to accept. That general consent point is really important when you start talking about the future of tax in New Zealand.
And then the third thing is there’s no such thing as a perfect tax system and as Robin pointed out, we navigate it, every tax policy choice is a bunch of trade-offs, and we navigate those trade-offs with some well-established principles. You know, equity efficiency, administration etcetera. And those principles can never be applied scientifically. In the end, they come down to, in my view anyway, value judgments at the margin, and that’s where the politics comes into the tax system as it as it should be.
So what is a good tax system? Well as Rob and Robin said, primarily one that raises revenue with the least cost to society. And there are secondary objectives, and those are the distributional impacts. I think those are important for policymakers to take into account. And I think they feedback around into the consent of citizens to be taxed and and the fundamental democratic process actually. and. Most OECD countries, in fact all I think, have progressive tax systems by and large and general voting patterns suggest that that’s the majority view of life across OECD democracies.
The problem with behavioural taxes
Other secondary objectives that Rob and Robin mentioned with behavioural changes, carbon taxes and things and those are very specific instruments of public policy, and they might raise some short term revenues. But they shouldn’t be relied on for long term revenues and it’s almost a different category of taxation to the general tax system because if they work – those behavioural taxes – the revenues will often dry up, will be reallocated into the areas that they’re trying to change.
TB That’s something we’re actually seeing with the tobacco excise duty. It worked and now revenues are falling and now that’s sort of a hole in the finances.
RO But if that works, yeah, it’s the same as environmental taxes. You know you have taxes on degradation of the environment. And if you don’t degrade the environment, you get no money. And it’s perfectly fine. They work, but back to Geof’s point. I totally disagree that redistributions got anything about it. You clearly have to have a democracy; in a democracy you have to have consent. I agree with that. You have to have consent to make the tax system work because of voluntary compliance and all that.
Poll taxes – efficient but unworkable?
But the purpose of tax is to raise the money in the most cost-effective way. And I give the example of that is the poll tax, Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax. I mean poll taxes are loved by economists because it’s thought of as being efficient. But it doesn’t work. I mean if you want to raise New Zealand’s government revenue by poll tax you’ve got to raise about $30,000 per individual. You’re not going to go out to people in South Auckland, a family household, and demand $100,000 from them please. I mean, they don’t have it. And there’s no point in demanding money, which people just don’t have.
And that’s why even an efficient tax system, inevitably given the level of government expenditure we have, will need to be progressive. Because you know the lower income earners just don’t have money to pay the tax that the government needs. But again, the point is, you’re really trying to raise money to spend on health, education and welfare and you want to do it at least cost. And forget about trying to have a secondary objective of redistributing income, that just leads you into bad taxes. And that’s led us from having a good tax system to one which is now pretty awful or going that way.
TB It’s a hell of a topic that. I mean, there is always a redistributive effect of tax, and the recent Treasury paper on the fiscal incidence of taxation was quite interesting in that regard.
RO Yes, good paper.
What about ring-fencing taxes for certain objectives?
TB The Treasury paper showed health and education benefits going to different deciles. They’re essentially redistributed within the system. So just a quick thought about these behavioural taxes Do you actually see much of a role for ring fencing? Tax takes such as, for example, environmental taxation that we raise these, we’re trying to encourage better behaviour, but the funds don’t go into the general pool but are used to mitigate the impact of climate change. Is there a role for that Rob?
RM Yes, I think I think there is. We call this hypothecation and we’ve had hypothecation in the area of fuel taxes for example, which are put on road users and then reinvested back on to roads at various times. But over time, you know, I think that money was ultimately then sent to the consolidated fund.
RO I mean, money is fungible. And therefore, putting it in one pot versus many pots, you can have an argument about whether that’s effective. I think ultimately if governments ensure there is a correlation between how they apply the funds and the taxes they raise, and hypothecation is a solid principle to get that correlation. But I think that the more recent view of governments has been that they can be relied on to effectively finance it all out of a consolidated pot. So yes, hypothecation is certainly there, and we’ve got examples of it.
Economists hate hypothecated taxes, because it ends up government spending money wastefully and low priority areas, because that’s where the money is. But it does serve a purpose, it provides the right incentives. There’s a case for it you know road user charges, Rob said was a good case in point. And you can make other cases like how do we control the level of health expenditure? Well, you could hypothecate GST to health and if people want to spend more on health, GST goes up and everybody has to pay it, so you can end up with arguments for hypothecated taxes. But the economists really hate them.
GN At the risk bringing distributional effects back onto the table, hypothecated taxes can also be highly regressive, so yes, I’ll just leave that there.
TB Yes, a common hypothecated tax around the world, which we don’t now have but once did, was Social Security. You see that many other jurisdictions had that and we’d had that until the late 60s. I think it was Rob Muldoon who decided stuff this we’ll just get rid of it because it was, as Rob described, was just going into the consolidated fund. But looking way back, it was a quite significant part of tax revenues if you look track the history of tax.
The problem with social security taxes
RO And very important in Europe in particular, and the United States of America. And we are very lucky not to have them. Australia and New Zealand, one of the few OECD type countries not to have Social Security payroll taxes, which are linked with the benefits. The reason for that is it results in peoples’ old age pensions, or whatever you call them – New Zealand super being linked with past earnings.
And that means that the poor are really poor, when they are elderly. And that’s the case in the UK. Everybody gets the same in New Zealand which in my view is absolutely a much better system than using your tax system to provide benefits linked with wages. Which means particularly women who are not always in the workforce, but child rearing, skills get really done over. I think we’ve got a much more equitable system of expenditure on welfare because we don’t have that.
The incidence of tax – who is actually bearing the tax burden?
RM Terry, can I just perhaps take us back to redistribution, I think there’s one important point about redistribution which unfortunately is a bit of a technical point. But it’s one that is overlooked not only by lay persons, you know, people not familiar with technical stuff, but also the tax profession itself. Which is the issue of incidence.
So if you just start with the GST as an example, most New Zealanders wouldn’t accept, and rightly, that the GST is not imposed on them. And yet, if you have a look at who pays the GST, they don’t pay it. The consumers do not send cheques to Inland Revenue. The tax is actually imposed on businesses. As a matter of imposition. When we talk about redistribution, we’re inclined to assume that the tax impact is where the law imposes it, but the key principle that’s demonstrated by the GST example is the market actually takes that tax and spreads it around, arguably like margarine, to all of the stakeholders and sometimes non stakeholders, and the and the contract to be affected.
These are such things as gross ups, if you go and slap a tax on somebody and they’ve got market power, they’ll put the price up of what they’re supplying to others. And in so doing, they’ll pass that tax burden on to others. And this is completely ignored in my view, when people are talking about redistribution, because there’s the assumption that the taxes that are actually imposed by the government, is actually borne by the people who send cheques to Inland Revenue Department, is utterly false. And if you try and unravel that mathematically and work out who actually is bearing the tax, the best you can get to on most of it is estimates including the dead weight loss of the 20% that Robin is talking about, it’s there’s a lot of estimation going on to get to those numbers.
There’s no argument that that economic effect is real, and for me that’s a big undercut of why I don’t buy all the redistribution argument, because it tends to proceed on the assumption that the way the government’s levying the tax will ultimately shape and determine the burden of it.
RO We don’t know a lot about the incidence of tax. But what we do know, it’s almost never born entirely by the person paying it. So, you end up with these studies, like the awful IRD study on high wealth, totally ignoring this fact, just totally ignoring it.
And the classic example of economics in the United States is that you have local body bonds, the interest rate is tax free. It’s a subsidy to like City Councils or what, and the federal government doesn’t tax them.
The high wealth individual – the person on the very high rates – ends up owning all these municipal bonds. They don’t pay any tax. But they’re getting a lower interest rate because they’re bidding up the price of these bonds, which is what’s intended and the local City Council get cheap money. And then along comes a bunch of officials measuring their tax burden and finding it zero. Disastrous. Horrible. Well, in fact, they’re paying it through the lower interest rates on it.
And this happens all the time, all through the tax system. You put taxes up on foreigners, that’s a good idea. Foreigners we don’t like, they’re not voting, and we put big tax on foreigners. They just simply demand a higher rate of return or don’t invest here. We end up with lower productivity, lower wages and the economics is absolutely clear. Put your tax on your non-resident investor, it ends up coming out in lower wages. And that’s exactly Rob’s point. The incidence is always shifting and yet we totally ignore this. The political debate just assumes the world is not what it is.
TB Robin, I think we’re going to see more and more of that. Sorry, Geof, you were about to say something.
GN I totally agree with Robin and Rob on incidence, it’s critical. But it comes back to my opening point that you can only tax through consent, eventually. If incidence is not well understood, policymakers – and it’s very hard and very slippery getting your hands on the concept – but policymakers need to think about it. But if you can’t convey that to voters, then it becomes kind of irrelevant.
I remember Sir Rob’s MacLeod committee and the $1,000,000 tax cap for individuals. I thought was a was a great idea because of that sort of argument that we’d be better off with $1,000,000 than not. But that policy is too easy to attack politically from an equity and a sort of a fairness sense. And that’s what happens in the real world as we all know and that’s why we end up in political arguments around the secondary purposes of the tax system, as opposed to really discussing the primary purpose of the tax system Which is least cost revenue raising for government policy. So, I agree with their incidence comments, but it works both ways, I think.
RM Can I just jump in on that one and just observe that in the McLeod Review where we did recommend that to be honest, I think it’s politicians that say that say no to those sorts of things than not, as opposed to public sentiment. Muldoon made the famous quote that Joe Blog, the average person on the street, wouldn’t know fiscal deficit if he tripped over one. And I think that’s a long way back and things weren’t as sophisticated then as perhaps they are now.
But if you think about the complexities of tax and you think about the extent to which the public is actually engaged with that complexity, I think that you are apt to over egg that interaction. Because ultimately politicians and officials and people like ourselves, there is a leadership role we play and the public follows that leadership.
I think you can observe that in history. The differences between countries and the qualities of their tax system often reflect the differential qualities of officials, politicians, et cetera, that’s going on in those countries. So, while I agree that in the concept of democracy, there’s a public underbelly in debate and voting terms, there’s one hell of a space for leadership and tax policy. Otherwise, we might as well pack our bags and go home. And I think that that is very influential and that’s why these debates and these principles of incidence and so on are important and need to be approached in the way we’re doing it.
RO We can see that with GST. We’ve got a flat rate, a good GST system, world class.
I remember back in the 80s Sir Robert Muldoon, the proposals was put to him about that. And he said, “You mean we’re going to tax water?” And he chuckled, “No way.” We put GST on doctor’s bills. People overseas think that’s just totally astonishing. Yet there’s broad support for what we have in GST, a non-progressive tax. Bizarrely we legislated to make it regressive, but it does meet those economic principles and it’s got widespread support. I mean, politicians keep on arguing for GST on no food, but those proposals get put up and get rejected every time.
Rob McLeod’s suggested alternative to a capital gains tax
TB Rob in your review, you raised the possibility of the risk-free rate of return method (RFRM) as an alternative to a capital gains tax. And we’ve seen that in the Foreign Investment Fund regime. Are you still keen on the idea?
RM The RFRM, the McLeod Review, came largely out of the debate around taxing housing. And this was in a discussion document, by the way. It wasn’t the final recommendation; it was abandoned because of what Robin said. Michael Cullen’s switchboard was blown up by the complaints of from telephone callers and we knew that was a pretty strong signal that no government was ever going to support it.
So, we pulled the plug. But basically, the problem with taxing assets that produce, that give sort of imputed income like your motor car or your house or your washing machine, there’s no cash flow to really measure the income. It’s economic income, but it’s hard to measure. And so, the beauty of the RFRM is that you calculate it effectively as a wealth tax, which is applying a percentage, I think we had 4%, against the market value of the of the equity in the asset. It’s quite important. That’s one feature of the RFRM is you’ve got to work out what you’re going to do with debt, debt funding of the asset. And we came to the conclusion we’re best to deal with that by narrowing the tax onto the equity, which is the total value of the asset minus debt associated with it. Which brings in problems because people then start to plan with where they load their debt, right?
But it was simplicity. If we could have made the income tax work on that kind of asset that’s a superior way of going, if you can make it work. I think the only reason you go to RFRM in substitution is there’s easier compliance and administration for taxpayers and the Inland Revenue. The F|IF regime I think Terry came out of the international regime As the child of the CV, the mark-to-market option.
I think you’re thinking of the FDR [fair dividend rate] in today’s terms is probably the most relevant analogy. Fixed dividend rate which I think did come from a an RFRM logic, although it’s a bit screwy because FDR, the RFRM tax principle is you should apply it at the riskless rate of return, and not at the risky rate of return, which is the way FDR works. And also, no deductions which FDR doesn’t abide by in its various option formats. So the concept is much the same but quite different in detail.
What’s surprising in the tax world now?
TB Is there anything in the tax world that surprises you right now?
RO I would say the wealth tax coming on the table, totally unworkable. According to the papers the last government almost legislated for a wealth tax in the last budget, ??? funding and massive reductions in income tax rates. And that wealth tax was completely unworkable and would never get off the ground. It was a total nuclear bomb on our tax system. The fact that people are seriously talking about totally impractical things is a serious concern.
We’ve got to be adults here. There is no fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Grow up. Taxes have to be pragmatic and have to be workable, and trying to measure everybody’s wealth on a comprehensive basis every year is not.
GN I remain surprised by the continued acceptance by middle New Zealand of what I consider to be really high effective tax rates on labour income through the combination of GST and [tax] rates. And I remain surprised when you look at their voting patterns, their general resistance to extending taxation into capital income to address that, so not raising taxes as a percentage of GDP, but recycling revenue, shifting the instance of where slightly where that tax is paid, and it continues to surprise me. I think that message came through the high net worth survey that came out last year, but it was obfuscated by the complexity and some of the methodology problems and the way that survey was done. That’s what I’m still surprised at.
TB I think there’s a general lack of awareness of what effective marginal tax rates are and how they interact and how high they are at relatively low incomes. The 30% rate, $48,000 is a real problem threshold.
RM I suppose I am a bit surprised that the fundamental features of what’s been great for the New Zealand tax system, reappear as controversies, in the political realm particularly. Like the high tax rate. The problem is that Europe’s got high tax rates and Australia’s got high tax rates. New Zealand trying to wave the flag in favour of the low tax rate component of the BBLR has been a challenge. And I think it’s actually been because our neighbour has high marginal rates. And Europe has been very influential on people like Robertson and so on in my opinion in the sense that they buy into the idea that we can have government spending and taxes at 50% plus of the GDP. I should say that I’m therefore not surprised by it. But I think that’s been the big disappointment, that our rates structure has been allowed to sort of get up, and in a sense it’s part of narrow base, high rate [NBHR] thinking. They don’t realise that with those high rates comes the NBHR concept.
The other thing I just touched on is I kind of worry about the international – the OECD and the EU – devices through which large countries bully other countries. And the treaty networks and the BEPS regime and all that sort of stuff is typically a mask for powerful big countries grabbing money off other countries. And the more that happens, that’s a source of corruption and cancer for me and can ripple down and reach these national tax systems. And we’ve had more of that in the last five years than we’ve ever had before.
RO The OECD stuff is probably more two big elephants fighting, the US versus Europe and we get squashed in the middle.
TB I think that’s why the Global South is pushing back and trying to get the UN involved led by Nigeria and Pakistan which are small economies globally, but giant populations, you’re talking over 400 million people between them. They’re not buying into Pillar two. There seems to be pressure building in that area.
What one proposal from your respective tax working groups would you like to see implemented?
RM That’s a that’s a good question. Sorry to be boring, but I think I came back to the broad-based low rate. For Geof and Robin who know me well, I am a bit of a bore-a-thon drum beater on base principles, and the thing that I’ve seen is the base principle lose a bit of its grip in New Zealand in the last decade. We’ve taken our personal and our trust rate to 39%, which I do not like.
It’s the fiscal stuff that’s that this government is arguing that I don’t accept that it’s necessary for that, but that’s another big debate point about understanding how balance sheet management in government needs to be separated from profit and loss account management. I don’t think that those two aspects of the debate are properly worked through. We should take the longer road and the longer term to fix our debt issues, obviously try and avoid them from happening in the first place. But debt is not necessarily needed to be paid immediately. And not to be factored immediately into tax rate design in my opinion, which is a mistake that we’re currently going through.
GN I’ll be boringly repetitive, but I think the extension of income tax to more realised capital gains on a realisation basis and then using that revenue to recycle, I think that’s got equity efficiency benefits. And I also think it helps in some ways to resolve those high effective marginal tax rates around our productive sector of our economy, labour productivity. So that’s still what I would do if we were able to do one thing.
RO Oh, I still like Rob’s RFRM on residential rental and get rid of all these bright lines, interest deductions and ring-fencing rules. The other one Geof raised was seriously considered by the Labour government under Michael Cullen, was that you pay a million bucks worth of tax and you’ve done your bit and go away. An anathema now, times have changed. That was acceptable then it seems, but not now.
It was seriously considered by the caucus at the time. The idea is you get someone come and live in New Zealand and pay a million bucks and fund a Children’s Hospital. Doesn’t seem to me to be a bad idea.
RM Like a hypothecated tax, Robin?
RO I wouldn’t mind if it was hypothecated for good healthcare for children. I think that would be good.
TB Well, I think we’ll leave it there. I want to thank my guests this week, Sir Robert McLeod, Robin Oliver and Geof Nightingale. It’s been fantastic talking with you all. Thank you so much for being part of this.
[This is an edited part of the full podcast which readers are encouraged to download and listen to at the link at the top of this page.]
On that note, that’s all for this week, I’m Terry Baucher and you can find this podcast on my website www.baucher.tax or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and please send me your feedback and tell your friends and clients. Until next time, kia pai to rā. Have a great day.
IMF and Climate Change Commission suggest changes to the Emissions Trading Scheme are needed.
Like a never-ending Groundhog Day, every International Monetary Fund report on the New Zealand economy suggests tax reforms would promote efficiency. For example,
“There is a sense that the asset allocation in New Zealand households has a bit too much emphasis on housing versus other investments. We think a capital gains tax at the margin would help.”
That was IMF Mission Chief Thomas Helbling in 2017.
“…tax policy reforms are needed to promote investment and productivity and growth increase, increase the progressivity of income tax and mobilise additional revenue in response to long term fiscal challenges. To achieve these objectives, reforms should combine comprehensive capital gains tax, land value tax and changes to corporate income tax.”
And invariably the IMF’s conclusions are usually followed by a fairly dismissive response from the Minister of Finance of the day.
In 2002 it was the late Sir Michael Cullen responded to that year’s report: “The IMF’s credibility is not assisted by the fact that it tends to apply the same policy template regardless of the country’s circumstances”. This year Nicola Willis’s retort was “There are some things that are certain in life, death, taxes and the IMF recommending a capital gains tax.”
Associate Minister of Finance David Seymour also weighed in commenting. “I see the IMF again saying, oh, you need a capital gains tax. Every country has one. The only countries that don’t have one are New Zealand and Switzerland. But I say let’s be more like Switzerland.”
However, I’m not so sure that this was quite the zinger he hoped because as someone mischievously pointed out on Twitter, Switzerland has a wealth tax and a $59 per hour minimum wage in Geneva.
Deputy Prime Minister and former Treasurer Winston Peters was apparently not available for comment.
A de-facto capital gains tax – the bright-line test
Now, amidst all of the commentary about the IMF’s suggestions, one of the things that came up time and again is that in many ways, we do have a de-facto capital gains tax, except we don’t call it that. The bright-line test is an example of the approach that we’ve adopted, which has been ad hoc and responsive based on the government of the day’s policies at the time.
As you may recall the bright-line test was brought in with effect from 1st October 2015 by the National Government and it then applied to disposals within two years. In March 2018 the Labour Government introduced a five-year period and in 2021 it was increased a 10-year period. And so, a quite confusing scenario has developed as to which bright-line test applies because some of the exemptions have changed over time as well, particularly in relation to the main family home.
In one way, therefore, the reduction of the bright-line test back to two years again from 1st July is to be welcomed because it is clarifying and simplifying what has become an incredibly complicated area.
Tax Red Flags: More than just the bright-line test to be considered
The bright-line test and taxation of land has plenty of red flags when together with the excellent Shelley-ann Brinkley and Riaan Geldenhuys and moderator Tammy McLeod, I made a presentation about tax red flags on Tuesday to the Law Association. (Formerly the Auckland District Law Society). My thanks again for the invitation to present and to my excellent co-presenters, we had a very lively session talking around this.
In short when you drill into our current land taxation rules, they are very incoherent. The bright-line test is a backup test. It applies if none of the other land taxing provisions apply. And this is something that tripped up people before the bright-line test was introduced and will continue to do so even now it’s been reduced down to two years.
For many people, the particular issue to watch out for is the question of subdivision. If you own a property and undertake a subdivision within 10 years of acquisition it may still be caught under the existing rules, outside of the bright-line test. And in some cases, you may be caught by the combination of the provisions with the associated persons test which deem transactions to be taxable if at the time you acquired the land you were associated with the builder, dealer, or developer in land.
Sometimes the tax charge can be triggered way past the 10-year timetable since acquisition. That’s particularly the case in relation to a disposal of property where building improvements have been carried out. That particular provision, section CB 11 of the Income Tax Act, deems income to arise if a person disposes of land and
“within 10 years before the disposal”, the person or an associate of the person completed improvements to the land and at the time the improvements were begun, the person or an associated person carried on a business of erecting buildings. Note, the reference to “within 10 years before the disposal.” So, you may have owned that land for considerably longer than 10 years and yet still be subject to the provision.
Just a pro tip for anyone thinking ‘Great, with a two year bright-line test coming in, I can now sign a sale and purchase agreement, make sure settlement takes place after July 1st and it’s not going to be subject to the bright-line test.’ That’s not the case. The sale point for the bright-line test in that case is when the sale and purchase agreement is signed and not when settlement happens. I had at least one client get caught by that very provision because they went for a long settlement thinking that got past the two year period. It didn’t, and it is another case of always seek advice on transactions involving land, because as I’ve just outlined, the provisions are complicated.
Could a capital gains tax be ‘simpler?’
And this was the point we reinforced during our seminar. There is a lot of complexity already in our tax system around the taxation of land and in my view, in some ways a capital gains tax would actually clear away a lot of that uncertainty. It’ll become clearer that, broadly speaking, if you buy something, and you sell it subsequently, any gain will be taxable.
Now, how the gain is calculated and the rate at which it’s taxed are two different things. But often in the debate around the capital gains tax, those two things get conflated to run as an argument against the taxation of capital gains.
In my view, the point still remains that we have a confusing hotchpotch approach to taxing capital gains and at some point, grasping the nettle with a CGT as suggested by the IMF and also the OECD, would ultimately perhaps be a better approach.
Incidentally, doing so would be consistent with the well-established principle we have of the broad-based low-rate approach. There’s nothing to say that by broadening the tax base, we could not hold tax rates at current levels or even lower. Bear in mind that the when the last tax working group recommended the capital gains tax, it was intended to keep to help keep the top tax rate at 33%.
Watch out for trustees on the move across to Australia
One of the other issues that came up in our Tax Red Flag Seminar was the question of trustees, and beneficiaries and settlors moving cross-border, particularly to and from Australia. That is something all three of us are seeing quite a bit of and it is something to watch out for as a key red flag.
The IMF on how to tax wealth
If there is a certain repetitiveness to the IMF’s discourse about taxing capital, it’s part of a global discourse on the topic. Earlier this month the IMF released a How to Tax Wealth note. These how to notes are “intended to offer practical advice from IMF staff members to policy makers on important issues.” And this this was a very interesting read as you might expect.
The IMF’s How to Tax Wealth note neatly coincided with the release of the UBS/Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report for 2023. According to the report, in 2022 New Zealand ranked sixth in the world with an average wealth of US$388,760 per adult. On the basis of median adult wealth per adult, again in U.S. dollars, we ranked 4th behind Belgium, Australia and Hong Kong, with a median wealth of US$193,060.
Incidentally, these rankings were after a very sharp fall from 2021 levels, where New Zealand was only behind Sweden in the biggest loss in wealth per adult.
I am genuinely very surprised to see New Zealand rating so highly for both average wealth and median wealth. On the other hand this Credit Swisse/UBS report is another example of why there’s a great debate going on around the taxation of wealth not just here, but globally.
And this IMF How to Tax Wealth note is instructive in its approach. It starts by making a very obvious point, how much to tax wealth is a distinct question from how to tax wealth. The note argues that:
“returns to capital generally should be taxed for equity and possibly efficiency reasons. and that in many countries, wealth inequality and better tax enforcement strengthen the case for higher effective taxation than in the past.”
Now the IMF doesn’t make any particular proposal about a specific level of tax, the note is basically about ‘here are things you should consider.’ But on the question of wealth taxes, it does come down pretty much against them noting,
“Improving capital income taxes tends to be both more equitable and more efficient compared with replacing them with net wealth taxes. Countries hence should prioritise improving capital income taxation over considering the introduction of wealth taxes”.
Then it talks about – in terms of strengthening capital taxes – addressing loopholes, notably the under taxation of capital gains in many countries. There’s a passing comment, that perhaps you can use a one-off net wealth tax or maybe apply it to very, very high wealth levels.
Time for inheritance tax?
But the Note also concludes “taxing capital transfers through gifts or inheritance provides another opportunity to address wealth inequality.” The IMF comments that the efficiency costs of such taxes are modest, and notes that “inheritance taxes are better aligned with redistribution than estate taxes, since exemptions and rate structures can account for the circumstances of the heirs.”
What really makes the New Zealand tax system unique is not the absence of a capital gains tax because, as David Seymour pointed out, other countries don’t have that, namely Switzerland. It’s the complete absence of taxes on the transfer of wealth, which has been the case now since 1992. That’s what makes New Zealand unique – we have no general capital gains tax together with no estate or gift or wealth taxes.
And this is an area where I think a lot more consideration needs to go into because as the IMF noted, we’ve got fiscal challenges ahead, and where might the revenue be raised from to meet those challenges.
The IMF and Climate Change Commission suggest changes to the ETS
And finally, back to the IMF again. It concluded its mission report by noting that “New Zealand’s ambitious climate goals call for major reforms,” and it referenced the Emissions Trading Scheme, having helped limit net emissions by encouraging robust reductions and removals, particularly from afforestation.
But the IMF then went on to say that “significant reforms” are going to be needed to meet domestic and international targets, and these include reducing the number of available units in the ETS, pricing agricultural emissions and strengthening the incentives for gross emissions reductions within the ETS. The IMF finally note that given the ambition of New Zealand’s first nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, the use of international mitigation i.e.; buying credits from offshore, is likely to be required.
Now the IMF report was a week after the Climate Change Commission, and pretty much said the same thing, and advised the coalition government they should halve the number of ETS units on offer in each of the next six years. The last ETS auction did not go brilliantly. That has a flow on effect in that by reducing the amount of income from emission trading unit sales, it’s going to limit crown revenue for tax cuts.
Vale Rod Oram
It’s interesting to see a confluence of opinion happening here and an appropriate time to remember the late Rod Oram someone who was a very strong environmental journalist. I was fortunate enough to know him all too briefly after we met at a panel discussion. We’d planned on him appearing as a guest on the podcast. Sadly, with his passing that will never happen now, and our thoughts go out to his family and friends.
And on that note, that’s all for this week, I’m Terry Baucher and you can find this podcast on my website www.baucher.tax or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and please send me your feedback and tell your friends and clients. Until next time, kia pai to rā. Have a great day.
Plus big changes to the retirement landscape she helped initiate.
She also explains why she was one of the first of the 97 signatories on the Open Letter on Tax.
During her time as Retirement Commissioner, she also helped develop a national strategy for financial literacy that incorporated practical strategies such as the excellent sorted.org website, multimedia campaigns and education in schools.
More recently, Diana was the chief executive of the Wellington Free Ambulance and is presently chair of the Lifetime Retirement Income and several charities. She is also one of the initial 97 signatories of last month’s Open Letter on Tax.
Ki Ora Diana, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us.
Diana Crossan Ki Ora Terry, thank you for having me.
TB Oh, not at all. Enormous privilege and thank you. I’m really fascinated. You’ve got an incredibly distinguished career there. But I’m most fascinated by your time as Retirement Commissioner. Because when I was researching/writing Tax and Fairness and looking at the superannuation savings regime, as it was in 2002, prior to when you took over, it was pretty much ground zero. There was practically little or no incentives to save.
And we know that the numbers of superannuation schemes had basically collapsed from where the numbers that prior to the removal of insane tax incentives in 1988, they had fallen quite dramatically, to I think barely 13% of the workforce was covered about 2002.
So, you come onto the scene, you’re appointed Retirement Commissioner. It must have been quite daunting. What were your thoughts when you volunteered for that?
Diana Crossan You’re right, it was a bit overwhelming initially. And I was the second Retirement Commissioner, the first one was Colin Blair, who was a tax specialist. So, when the government set up the retirement commission, they thought that they were helping the nation. Hopefully they were because we had a superannuation, or a retirement savings system that was very different from the rest of the world, or the OECD world really.
We had New Zealand super, which is of course brilliant, and should be protected and we had private saving. The Retirement Commissioner was supposed to be there to help people understand that they needed to save for their own retirement. That was why it was set up.
And what we discovered – the Retirement Commission was just on to this when I arrived – was that the advertisements and the encouragement and all of the messages they were sending out to people were getting to people who were already looking for it. It was preaching to the converted, really.
And the average age of people they were talking to at that point was about 45 to 50, and the Retirement Commission recognised that that wasn’t going to work. That starting to save at that late stage in your career didn’t work. So that’s how it came about. The recognition that maybe in the 2000s at the beginning of this century, we had to do something very different.
So, they stopped all paper brochures and television interviews and things that focussed on brochures. And the team introduced Sorted https://sorted.org.nz/ and I came in just at that time. And so the focus on financial literacy and on getting to people earlier was the most important thing I picked up when I first arrived.
TB And that’s been a huge transformation there, I take.
Diana Crossan Yes, absolutely. We started off by thinking, how do we do this? You know, this is new. I thought it was very brave of the group just before I arrived. You talked about the national strategy for Financial Literacy.
We were one of the first countries to do that because we recognised that if the government was (and we kept talking to government about other things as well) going to stick with this policy of having a New Zealand super, which was very basic as we know, somewhere between 30 and 40% of New Zealand population live on New Zealand super alone. So first of all, it was that and then it was up to you to say we needed to find ways of talking to people about what to save, how to save, how safe is it. All of the issues in our trustworthy financial services sector, we needed to talk about that. We need to talk about government policy that didn’t get in the way.
So until KiwiSaver came along, we were different from the rest of the world. The countries that we tend to look up to like Australia, Canada, US – well, the US is unusual – the UK and parts of Europe because we didn’t have the middle pillar which is about supported saving by government.
TB Yes, some countries do that by means of very generous tax incentives which were abolished under Roger Douglas in late 1988. So, you were closely involved in the development of KiwiSaver?
Diana Crossan Yes, Michael Cullen approached me to join the team. So, it was an interesting group of people from a variety of government organisations and his statement was “We are going to have a savings scheme. I don’t want this group to come back and say it’s not a good idea because we’re going to have it while I’m in government. What I do want you to do is tell me how to develop that.”
And just before I came into the Retirement Commission role, I had been funded by a businessman and business family in Auckland who asked me to look at how we could help New Zealanders go to university and polytechnic, tertiary education. There were high fees and high interest rates for university students at that time.
So, we had done four years of work about a children’s savings scheme. Therefore, when I was asked to join the KiwiSaver group by Michael Cullen, I was able to take all that work to that. So that included the kick start and included thinking about other ways of doing things.
TB Yes, it’s been enormously successful. Even the FMA Financial Market Authority’s June 2022 report now says that we have $90 billion in KiwiSaver as of 30th June 2022 and over 3.17 million members. And that’s not even 20 years. It’s 15 years max. It’s been transformative.
Diana Crossan It is, however, there are issues with that. As you know, there are a lot of people who don’t know where their money goes or know what kind of fund they’re in. And they might be young and in a fund that’s quite conservative and they could do better to be in the balanced or growth funds, and they don’t understand that.
So that’s what the financial literacy was about. Also, many of them have very low savings in KiwiSaver. And while it will be helpful when they get to retirement, we want people to put more in now so that they have a better retirement when they retire.
TB How do we achieve that? The Tax Working Group in 2018 made a number of recommendations around that. It was suggesting that perhaps we should increase for example, a KiwiSaver member on parental leave would receive a maximum member tax credit even if they didn’t make the full $1042 contributions. And we saw something in the last month’s Budget for that alongside that. But that’s not enough, is it really?
Diana Crossan No. And one of the recommendations I would have made, which was too bold, I think, is that if we want women to have children, and I think we do, and if we want women to have equal opportunity through their career and their retirement, that we do, then maybe we should be thinking about how we help women to keep their KiwiSaver going. We do it with ACC. We keep it going at 80%, so what about keeping KiwiSaver going?
You know, there’s lots of ways of thinking about it, but I think we have to be quite bold in that area because not only are women having time out to have children, but they’re also earning less on average. And so we need to find ways to reduce both of those things. And one would be while you’re on parental leave, your KiwiSaver is put in by the government to even things out. And the other one would be let’s keep pushing for equal pay.
TB Absolutely.
Diana Crossan It makes a difference in retirement.
TB Well, yes, because the thing about retirement is a dollar saved 20 years ago is worth exponentially much more than one saved with ten years to go to retirement. It’s that sort of thing. It’s just volume of savings steadily each year, year in, year out.
Diana Crossan So we’re not good at this, though, because we had a government – I think it closed in 1991 I think – a government savings scheme, a superannuation scheme for its staff. And what was interesting was of course women had unequal pay until the 1960s and some of those women who had unequal pay, when equal pay came in, there was no adjustment in the super.
So they lived out their lives on those savings that were made in relation to the pay at the time. And there was an attempt to tell government that this was completely unfair. Other countries, when they made equal pay rules and legislation, changed the super at the same time so that the women who’d retired by that stage got a better income.
TB Yes, that is still a perennial problem, and it shouldn’t be. As you say, equal pay is closing that gap, which is, what, 13% now?
Diana Crossan Yes, about that.
TB Give or take. Still, closing that gap is vitally important. And we all hear plenty of stories about the shortage of workers and experience. So I think, “Well, guys, we need to address those issues and retirement issues.” And looking at the Tax Working Group, what I liked about what it said in relation to proposal tax incentives, was they were focussed on the lower end.
Because to pick up your point earlier on when you became Retirement Commissioner, the people who should be saving knew they should be saving, were saving anyway. It was getting to those people who weren’t as aware as they needed to be about what they could do.
And so helping that group was what I liked about the Tax Working Group’s suggestions. For example, removing the employer superannuation tax charge on employer contributions below the $48,000 threshold at the moment. What do you think about the tax treatment of KiwiSaver and savings?
Diana Crossan I’m not a tax expert as I said earlier I think. It’s not something I have spent a lot of time on. I think my reason for signing up to the letter was much more about getting more tax, rather than tinkering with what we’ve got at the moment.
You might think, paying women when they’re on parental leave is tinkering. But it’s dear to my heart.
TB I don’t think it’s tinkering. I think it’s something we should be doing.
Diana Crossan In terms of why I signed up and why I’m interested in this issue, is I just don’t think we’ve got enough money. And I know it’s as basic as that. We have one of the lowest tax rates, as you know, in the OECD. Why do we do that? Why don’t we tax? We want the same schools, the same health services. We want housing for everybody. We want the same services as they have in France or as they have in Germany or Canada or Australia. But we all pay less tax. That’s just madness to me.
TB As I heard someone put it “We want Scandinavian levels of [‘free’] service, but American levels of tax” and the two are incompatible.
Diana Crossan There is strong evidence that investing in health and education outcomes leads to productivity and economic well-being. There’s strong evidence that if you focus on health and education in a nation that there will be an increase in productivity and an increase in economic well-being. Why don’t we do it?
TB Well, yes, because the way I do see it as an economic issue. Because if we have poor outcomes for lower income groups and Pasifika and Māori etc., that’s an economic anchor on the rest of us. We pay more for our health care.
And I know from my time when I was coaching rugby in South Auckland, players didn’t get the ACC treatment that we wanted them to get to have the injuries looked after because they couldn’t afford the little surcharge. That was only $5/$10. Some people, I think $5/ $10, that’s nothing. When you’re on minimum income, it’s a lot. And so you could see players, you could see from their injuries, that had never been properly treated, that there’s a shortage of funds there. And so longer-term health issues develop from that.
Diana Crossan And you’ll be aware that we’ve had underspend for a long time, so it is catch up time and that’s why I signed this letter. Yes, let’s get out there and say for those who can afford it, and we’re not talking about the stinking rich, we’re talking about people who could pay a little bit more. I mean, if we went to Australia, we’d be paying 45% and we’re paying 39% at the top and mostly 33%.
TB Yes, our tax rates are not high by world standards. To me, the big issue that we have in our tax system when we talk about income tax rates, is that low to middle income earners pay a lot more, the $48,000 threshold which it goes from 17% to 30% has not been lifted since 2010.
And how that’s been allowed to develop – politicians then come along and like snake oil salesman said, ‘Oh, we’re giving you a tax cut’. And I’m thinking, ‘No, you’re just simply restoring a position that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.’
So, there’s enormous pressure there, and then we’re on to the question of wealth. Last week, when I talked about how the Greens tax proposal for a wealth tax caused a lot of conniptions amongst people. So politically I think it’s going to be a hard push. But we have this aversion, it seems, to taxing capital, which I’m not sure where that’s developed. Is that something you’ve seen over time? Has it come up in discussions about broadening the tax base?
Diana Crossan What I’ve seen, Terry, I think there’s two things. One is people get nervous. It’s almost NIMBY, isn’t it? Let’s find a way of doing it in somebody else’s backyard but don’t let me pay more, let others do it somehow.
And I think there’s a lot of ignorance about what capital gains or wealth tax might be and that people are concerned they’re going to pay millions somehow. Yet not paying capital gains seems blatantly unfair. I would say if we could have a poll, I think we’d find more people would be for capital gains tax than those who are against it. And they were hoping that this government, when it had its huge mandate, would have done that. Maybe the ones against it are more vocal. But I think overall the people I meet, the ordinary people, understand that it’s fairer.
TB There’s an awful lot of misinformation that goes on around this now and watching the debate at the time. It was certainly the squeaky wheel squeaking a lot back in 2018/2019, happened to be those that would have been most affected by it.
Naturally someone who sits on substantial unrealised capital gains and property or whatever, of course they’re going to say, ‘Well, this is going to hurt, so I don’t want it’. And I don’t have a problem with people saying that. I know we need to look at the bigger picture.
Diana Crossan If you have enough money to get into the property market and you manage it well, you can make quite a lot of money.
TB On leveraging the gains, when you look at how generous our tax system was until this current Labour government came in, it was extraordinary generous. You could offset your losses against your other income, you’re able to leverage it. And one of the key parts of the return, the capital gain was untaxed, until the changes around Brightline tested all yanked that scenario.
So now we have a de facto capital gains tax applicable to one asset class, a residential property. You know, for me I have great fun explaining to people who want to migrate here from overseas. “Yes, we’ve got about five different tax treatments because we don’t have a general capital gains tax.” Now that keeps me in work, but I can hear the brains whirring away trying to understand the intricacies of the various regimes in place, thinking what is the problem here? Broadening the base means we can lower the tax rates. We may not need a 45% tax rate if we broaden the base.
Diana Crossan I’m not suggesting a 45%. Even if we went to 40%. My understanding is that the tax take brings in $113 billion. And if we had another $20 to 30 billion, we would be able to do the things we need to do in housing and health. And I can also hear people who might be listening saying “We can be more efficient, we waste money”. Well, my understanding is that yes, we can be more efficient, but we can’t make $20 to 30 billion out of efficiencies.
TB Yes, that’s the key issue. What was surprising, the Greens were proposing $10 to $12 billion of tax increase, a 10% tax increase to tackle it. That is a substantial tax increase. But it gives you an idea of the scale of the problem. But no one’s really talking about that. They were focussed on this wealth tax, which was probably the most ambitious part of the proposal and the least likely to actually come into force. Because that would require a lot of political balls to drop in the right place for that to happen.
Diana Crossan I think one of the things about the TOP party and the Green Party is their tax proposals didn’t increase the tax take a lot because they also were dealing with supporting the low income. That was more about making it fairer. I’m all for making it fairer too. But I think, we need more money. I know we need more money.
TB I keep harking on about the climate change costs. 700 properties were rendered unliveable by Cyclone Gabriel. That is probably the thick end of a billion dollars. And that’s just this year. 400 are in Auckland. Another 300 are along the Hastings, Napier, Tairawhiti-Gisborne and Wairoa districts, none of whom by the way have the funds. You can see from their rating base. So, it’s a communal responsibility.
Climate change doesn’t distinguish between postcodes. It’s coming and we’re dealing with it right now. And I think the crunch point will be the insurers. They’re already starting to say, “Well, we’re not going to insure you if you build there. We’re not going to give you that.”
Last week I got a call from someone who was down in Christchurch and they’re still arguing with the insurers over the earthquakes. We don’t want that scenario repeated across the whole of the country in relation to climate change.
Diana Crossan We certainly don’t. And while I’ve focussed on housing, education, child poverty and health – the whole issue of being prepared for what’s coming – we’ve had a taste of it and it’s not going to go away quickly.
We need to work hard for ourselves, but we can’t stop it all, so we’re going to have, I think we all agree, having weather we’ve never had before, and we’re going to have more weather we’ve never had before. And so we need more money. I just keep saying we need more money.
TB And a little a lot goes a long way.
Diana Crossan And people have asked why the signatories of the letter don’t just put their hands in their pockets and pay up and give more to education and health and poverty.
And what I know, of course, is that quite a few people I knew who signed the letter are already doing that. But some of them, of course, rightly said, “I’d be much happier if everybody was doing it and it was fairer across the board so that it wasn’t just philanthropists. We weren’t just relying on charity.”
TB Yes, that was my philosophy as well. And we are actually a generous nation in that. And what’s notable is often it is relatively low-income people are very generous, as a proportion of income given to charities.
Diana Crossan When I was working at Wellington Free Ambulance, it was collecting in the street. It was always very interesting who gave money, and it was people who you would think wouldn’t be able to afford to. But people are generous and that’s good. But I think it’s so much better for housing, health, even ambulance, I believe, should be part of our government funded services. And that’s what we want. And we just need to pay more even if I sound like a broken record, Terry.
TB Well, Dame Diana Crossan, that seems to be a very good place to leave it, broken record or not. I think it’s something we need to be hearing.
Thank you so much for being part of this podcast. It has been fascinating to talk to you and hearing the story of your back involvement with the Retirement Commission and the changing landscape, which has changed considerably for the better. Thanks for your efforts. It’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much.
Diana Crossan Sure. Thank you for having me.
TB That’s all for this week. I’m Terry Baucher and you can find this podcast on my website www.baucher.tax or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and please send me your feedback and tell your friends and clients. Until next time, kia pai to rā. Have a great day.
The Greens announced their tax proposals a week ago, last Sunday.
And my reaction was, “These are very bold.” They proposed major tax cuts at the lower end, meaning 95% of taxpayers will be better off under the Greens. Those cuts are paid for by increasing the top tax rate to 45% and increasing the 33% tax rate to 35% as well. These increases are part of the trade-off for the proposed nil rate band of $10,000, which no doubt will be very popular. As is well known, many other jurisdictions have something similar and given the fact that nothing has been done in relation to indexation of thresholds for well-nigh 13years now, it’s unsurprising that the pressure is built up, particularly at the lower end, to change the tax rates.
But most of that got swept away by the Greens controversial wealth tax proposal. In summary, there are two parts to it. Any individual whose net assets, net of mortgages for example, exceed $2 million will be subject to a wealth tax of 2.5% on the excess. For family trusts there is no nil rate band or threshold at all. It’s a flat 1.5% which is a deliberate anti-avoidance mechanism.
Latest Inland Revenue data on trusts
Trusts were used to avoid the impact of estate and gift duties in the past and are used in other jurisdictions to mitigate the impact of wealth and estate duties. So, the Greens have targeted this avoidance. Coincidentally, last Saturday the New Zealand Herald published a piece including details of the trust tax return filings made to Inland Revenue for the year end 31st March 2022 which indicated the value of assets held in trusts. The net assets of the 201,100 trusts which reported, was just over $300 billion. So at 1.5%, theoretically that’s $4.5 billion dollars straight up there.
Incidentally, what that Inland Revenue report doesn’t show is the non-reporting trusts, those are likely to be quite significant. We really don’t know how many trusts there are in New Zealand, the best estimates are somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000. Many of the non-reporting trusts don’t do so because they have no income, but they hold assets such as the family home. So, family homes that have been held in trusts may now be subject to the Greens’ proposal.
Now this kicked off quite a storm, which I watched with a little bemusement because the Greens first of all have to put themselves in a position of such leverage that its coalition partners, almost certainly Labour and Te Pati Māori, agree to the proposal. And then somehow between 14th October, the date of the election, and 1st April next year, the legislation to introduce all of this is drafted and passed through Parliament. So ,it’s a big challenge ahead.
But it caused quite a stir, and I fielded several calls from people concerned about what they saw here, trying to get an understanding about it and my views on it. At our Accountants and Tax Agents Institute New Zealand’s regional meeting on Tuesday we had a very lively debate around the question of this wealth tax. Normally, a lot of the time we’re talking about what’s in the legislation and whether Inland Revenue ever answer their phones again. All this I think shows the impact of the proposals, even though in theory they affect only a small group of people, the top 1%.
But there is substantial wealth locked up in property. We know that from digging around the official figures. For example, Auckland Council estimates the rateable value for all property within the Auckland Council region will be over one trillion dollars as of 30th June. Obviously, not all of those would be subject to a wealth tax.
What’s being suggested by other parties?
But I thought it was interesting that people are taking the Green’s proposals very seriously. The income tax shift to 45% on income over $180,000 won’t be terribly popular. But at present, the proposals that they’ve put out for the income tax cuts would affect many more people and benefit many more people, all those earning under $125,000, which is something like just over 4 million people. This has a broader impact than either National or Act’s proposals.
It’s quite interesting now as the election comes ever closer, we can start to see the tax policies of the various parties taking shape. The Greens are raising a substantial amount of tax to deal with poverty. Act is proposing tax cuts and it’s taking the ideologically opposite approach of substantial cuts to spending in order to achieve its top rate of 28%.
TOP, The Opportunities Party, are putting out a policy which has a land value tax, and they also propose tax increases at the higher end together a nil rate band and also substantial tax cuts at the lower end.
We haven’t yet heard from Labour on what they would do. Over on Twitter @binkenstein put together a graph comparing the various parties’ proposals so far.
So, the debate has ramped up quite a bit. Obviously, the Greens wealth tax is the most controversial part of it, but the other part which really got very little commentary but is equally controversial, was a proposal to raise the income tax rate for companies from 28% to 33%. More than most of the Greens’ proposals, that would probably produce a certain frisson of tension amongst multinationals. They may look and think “Maybe we might not increase our activities in New Zealand” or they may ramp up what they try and do under profit shifting.
Anyway, it all made for a very lively discussion all round. As I told people, wait and see. But it is interesting to see the pressure point for those are likely to be affected around a wealth tax.
What does the IMF think?
With almost impeccable timing, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, were in town and it suggested that maybe it was time for a capital gains tax.
The Concluding Statement of the 2023 Article IV Mission noted:
Well-designed tax reform could allow for lower corporate and personal income tax rates by broadening the tax base to other more progressive sources, such as comprehensive capital gains and land taxes, while also addressing fiscal drag and improving efficiency.
It’s not the first time the IMF has suggested changing the tax system. They did so in 2021. In fact, there’s a regular pattern of the IMF and/or the OECD coming here looking around saying, “Well, guys, the country is in good shape, generally government policy is pretty sound, but you need to do something about capital gains taxes.” Regardless of whichever party is in power the Government’s reaction is quite funny. They like the bit about everything being under control. But at the mention of capital gains tax, they all throw up their hands in horror. And yet, as we know all around the world, capital gains taxes are a common feature of tax policy.
The Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, the latest expansion of the Common Reporting Standards
Now, the Greens wealth tax proposal will probably be music to the ears of the French economist Thomas Piketty, who has proposed a global wealth tax, as one of the core points of his monumental work, Capital in the 21st Century. And at the time of publication in 2014, the opportunities for that global wealth tax to ever eventuate were probably just about zero or maybe marginally above zero.
But since then, we’ve had the introduction of the Common Reporting Standards which I think is actually revolutionising the tax world quietly because an enormous amount of information sharing is now happening on. We know from what’s been reported under the Automatic Exchange of Information that there’s something like €11 trillion held in offshore bank accounts. The Americans have got their FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, and as a result of that, they know that American citizens have got maybe US$4 trillion held offshore.
Now, the latest part of the Common Reporting Standards is extending the framework to crypto-assets and I talked about this last year when the proposals first came out. Those proposals have now been finalised and the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework is now in place. There have also been some amendments to the Common Reporting Standards. I’m going to cover all these changes in a separate podcast because I think they’re worth looking at in a bit more detail.
The tightening noose of information exchange
But the key trend in international taxation that’s going on, which I think is going to have a long-term impact around the world, and particularly for tax havens, is this growing interconnectedness, the sharing of information that goes on between tax authorities through mechanisms such as the Common Reporting Standards. I asked Inland Revenue about what information they had been supplied under the CRS in relation to the numbers of taxpayers and the amounts held in overseas bank accounts. Inland Revenue turned down my Official Information Act request on the basis that much of this is obviously confidential, but also would be compromising to the principles under which the information is shared.
Now, I’m not entirely sure about that. I think the more openness we have about what is being shared, the better the likelihood of tax enforcement once people cotton on to what’s happening. They will not think “Yeah, well, I’m just going to leave it over in the UK or the US or wherever, and Inland Revenue will never find out.” My view, as I tell my clients, is they always find out and they know much, much more than you can imagine.
And outside of the CRS there appears to be a regular exchange of information about property purchases between the United States Internal Revenue Service and Inland Revenue here. So be advised, the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework is just the latest in a building block of international information exchange.
The Auckland Budget – what about climate change?
And finally, the Auckland budget got signed off last week. I’ve been in the press disagreeing with the sale of any part of the Auckland airport shares, and I still stand by that. I think it’s a short-term fix for a long-term problem, but that’s now done and we move on.
What I did think was quite surprising as you delve into the budget is some of the numbers that come out. As I mentioned earlier, the rating base for Auckland and according to the Auckland Council’s documents is over $1 trillion.
But the thing that really surprises me, which wasn’t addressed in the budget so we’re going to have to address it next year, is the question of climate change. Towards the end of the process, the Government announced that in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle 700 homes around the country are too risky to rebuild. The Government and councils will offer a buyout option to those property owners.
400 of those are in the Auckland region and apparently it doesn’t also take into account what is going to have to happen out at Muriwai because of the slips and the dangerous cliffs over there. As Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson pointed out, “If you say it’s 400 [Auckland homes] times $1.2 million, give-or-take just like the average house price, you’re talking half a billion dollars.”
The question arises how is that split between Auckland ratepayers and the rest of the country? Yet there was nothing in the Auckland budget about this, and that’s just this year’s damage. What happens if we get another Cyclone Gabrielle, next year?
We’ve got an interesting scenario developing where we’re talking about reducing emissions and we’ve got a distant horizon 2030 or whatever farmers and other parties want to extend it to. But in the meantime, we are picking up the bill now for increased damage and we don’t seem to be thinking in terms of how does that affect our taxes and rates? And this is going to be an ongoing issue. So, the question of paying for that, whether it’s a wealth tax, capital gains tax, whatever, is going to become ever more present, in my view.
That’s all for this week. I’m Terry Baucher and you can find this podcast on my website www.baucher.tax or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and please send me your feedback and tell your friends and clients. Until next time, kia pai to rā. Have a great day.
When a post COVID-19 world dawns, there’ll be plenty of options for new taxes. Photo: Terry Baucher.
Terry Baucher on rising tax rates, the taxation of capital, environmental taxes, a rising corporate tax take and increasing power and reach of tax authorities
1) In the short-term tax rates will rise.
The initial shock to government balance sheets is enormous. To compound the problem, many governments are still recovering from the effect of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Here in New Zealand, the Government’s books were in good order coming into this crisis. But with projections of a potential doubling of net government debt in a matter of months the Government’s finances will undoubtedly come under strain.
In case you missed it, not only will there be a huge hole in the Government’s books as a result of this pandemic, but the inexorably rising cost of New Zealand superannuation remains. As is the not so small matter of responding to climate change. Remember, it was barely three months ago that smoke from Australia was affecting our atmosphere here.
The tax system was going to have to change to adapt to those two issues, and those changes will accelerate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first sign of how those issues will be addressed will be in next month’s Budget.
My guess is that next month’s Budget was going to include an adjustment of the tax thresholds probably targeted, as the Tax Working Group recommended, at low to middle income earners. I think that will still happen because putting money in people’s pockets in a recession would be a reasonable measure at this stage. It will however, be the last such adjustment for quite some time.
Medium-term, maybe within a couple of years, personal income tax rates are likely to rise, at least for high earners. It’s worth keeping in mind that the top individual tax rates in those countries we compare ourselves with, are several percentage points higher than New Zealand. In Australia and the United Kingdom, it’s 45%, the United States top rate is 37% and across the EU-28 it averages 39.4% with Sweden and Denmark the highest at 55%. A move higher seems inevitable, if not back to the 39% rate which prevailed between 2000 and 2009.
During the 1970s and early 1980s the Robert Muldoon led National Government responded to a series of economic shocks with several ad-hoc measures. These were increasingly ineffective and were swept away during the reforms of the 1984-1993 period. However, desperate times call for desperate measures and Grant Robertson or his successor might be tempted to follow the overseas examples of special levies.
Australia also had a Budget Repair Levy of 2% on incomes over A$180,000 between 1 July 2014 and 30 June 2017. It was replaced by a permanent increase in the Medicare Levy to 2.5% for those with income over A$180,000.
Separate from special levies, the ugly combination of the inexorably rising cost of New Zealand Superannuation, a significantly damaged economy and weaker government finances, means the continued universality of New Zealand Superannuation will be increasingly debated.
Options might include means testing, or a reintroduction of the deeply unpopular New Zealand Superannuation Surcharge, which applied in the 1990s. An alternative to these might be the proposal made by Susan St. John, for a special tax to apply to recipients of New Zealand superannuation who are earning above a certain threshold. This proposal at least has the merit of fitting in with the principles of a progressive tax system as it targets those whose income indicates that they are not really in ‘need’ of New Zealand Superannuation.
However, the TWG noted that GST is seen as a regressive tax for low-income earners. It’s also worth noting that increasing the rate of tax for a consumption tax such as GST could slow down spending, which is contrary to what’s going to be required in order to help restart the economy.
Instead what may happen over the medium-term is that GST may be extended to apply to financial services, something the TWG recommended be investigated. This could happen in the wake of overseas changes in this area. Globally I expect to see a fierce debate emerge on the matter of expanding the ambit of GST, with countries looking to withdraw or tighten current exemptions around food and financial services.
2. The taxation of capital.
Aside from short-term measures a longer-term implication will be increasing the tax on capital. This will also be a global issue.
Inevitably, here in New Zealand that will mean the reignition of the debate over whether New Zealand should introduce a comprehensive capital gains tax. That’s already begun with former Prime Minister Bill English raising the possibility in a briefing to private investors.
In the short term I suggest the answer will still be “no” for the simple reason it would do enormous damage to the Prime Minister’s reputation (and re-election hopes) for her to repudiate what she said little under a year ago that there would be no CGT while she was leader of the Labour Party.
Putting that aside, we can expect Inland Revenue to ramp up its enforcement of property disposals. It’s even possible New Zealand First might be persuaded to abandon its opposition to making all residential property investment subject to a CGT.
One of the key drawbacks to CGT is that it is a transactional tax – the tax only arises on disposal. If people aren’t buying and selling, no tax rises and there’s always been great concern about what they call the ‘lock in’ effect of a CGT. That is, people will not sell because they do not wish to trigger a tax liability. This means CGT revenues can be either a feast or a famine for governments who prefer more regular tax streams such as PAYE and GST.
Given the politics around CGT other alternatives may be considered. Globally, the idea of a wealth tax has been gathering momentum since Thomas Piketty raised the idea in his monumental work Capital in the 21st Century. A wealth tax is part of Senator Bernie Sanders’ platform. Here in New Zealand, the TWG dismissed a wealth tax as “a complex form of taxation that is likely to reduce the integrity of the tax system.”
Re-examining the role of a wealth tax in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic seems likely. The 5% fair dividend rate applying as part of the foreign investment fund regime is a de-facto wealth tax which could be adapted for this purpose (although at a much lower percentage, maybe a maximum of 2% as Piketty suggests). The fair dividend rate had its origins in the suggestion of the MacLeod Tax Working Group in 2001 of a applying risk-free rate of return methodology to the taxation of investment property.
The TWG also rejected the idea of a land tax, noting Maori concerns and its terms of reference. But maybe a land tax could be introduced for non-resident landowners only. This would be in line with a trend I see repeatedly in overseas jurisdictions of either taxing non-residents more heavily than locals or restricting the available exemptions. For example, in Australia non-residents do not qualify for the 50% discount for assets held for more than 12 months. Together with higher income tax rates the result is the tax rate on property disposals can be as much as 45%. Similarly, in the United Kingdom and the United States estate taxes of up to 40% apply to assets situated there. Expect to see these issues debated both here and abroad over the coming decade.
3. Environmental taxes will be more important.
Like the cost of New Zealand Superannuation, addressing the cost of climate change will soon push its way back up the tax agenda once the immediate COVID-19 pandemic crisis is past.
As part of this, the importance of environmental taxes to the tax base will rise. The TWG final report noted that according to the OECD, New Zealand ranked 30th out of 33 OECD countries for environmental tax revenue as a share of total tax revenue in 2013.
The TWG’s reference to the growing importance of environmental taxes was something that got drowned out last year with the debate over CGT. In his briefing at the launch of the TWG’s final report, Michael Cullen stressed the need to initially recycle revenues to help those farmers most affected transition to a greener economy.
What we will see emerge is a range of short-term tactical actions with immediate application allied to longer-term measures all intended to encourage a switch to a greener economy.
Tackling emissions in the transport sector could involve the use of congestion charging, putting more money into public transport including rapid electrification of trains and buses. Charging vehicle emissions could be part of this, perhaps allied with subsidies to get older cars off the road, replacing them with newer, more fuel efficient cars as an interim measure. This could achieve three benefits: it lowers emissions, reduces costs for families who are dependent on cars to move around and finally improves road safety because newer cars are safer. It would be a better use of funds than subsidising the purchase of electric cars.
The TWG recommended increasing the Waste Disposal Levy, currently $10 per tonne at landfills that accept household waste. The TWG noted the effect of increases in the equivalent levy in the United Kingdom as illustrated by the following graph:
Landfill tax rates and waste volumes in the United Kingdom
Other initial measures which would also raise revenues and simultaneously encourage behavioural change would be to remove fringe benefit tax on the use of public transport and, as in the United Kingdom, tie FBT to the level of emissions of the vehicle. (The coming clampdown on the non-compliance around FBT on twin-cab utes might have the indirect effect of taking these high emission vehicles off the road).
Tax is power. And maybe once matters have settled down, one of the most significant effects will be a shift in the power of taxation back towards the state and democracies. This will reverse the trend of the past 30 years ago or so, where lobbyists for corporates and special interests have been able to drive down corporate tax rates. This trend has been most noticeable overseas but as the CGT debate last year revealed New Zealand is not immune to the same influences.
The COVID-19 pandemic has almost certainly put paid to any idea of corporate income tax cuts. But the TWG noted that there was little justification for lowering corporate tax rates and a background paper prepared for it noted:
“…the two recent reductions in the company tax rate in New Zealand (from 33% to 30% on 1 April 2008 and from 30% to 28% on 1 April 2011) did not cause a surge of FDI into New Zealand. Nor did it show up in New Zealand’s level of FDI increasing relative to Australia’s.”
How the backlash against corporates will initially manifest itself will be in the adoption of the OECD’s international tax initiatives such as Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, or BEPS, and the recently launched Global Anti-Base Erosion Proposal (“GloBE”) – Pillar Two. The OECD estimates aggressive tax planning by multinationals costs US$240 billion annually.
Late last year, prior to the outbreak of coronavirus, these initiatives looked in danger of stalling after the United States indicated it might not adopt the measures. This appeared to be the result of lobbying by American multinationals. However, the US Government’s finances like those of every other country have been devastated by the pandemic.
So, for a brief moment, I can see the OECD and the US government’s intentions aligning, resulting in a relatively quick agreement on the changes to multinational taxation.
Notwithstanding the OECD measures, social media tech companies might find themselves hit with advertising levies as a means of supporting local media. India raised 939 crores (about $207 million) for the year ended 31st March 2019 from a digital advertising levy. Expect to see other countries follow suit (it could be one way of supporting New Zealand journalism and media which is in crisis as the collapse of Bauer Media shows).
This may now be the time to implement a global financial transactions tax. However, in order for an FTT to be effective, it must be universal. The European Union outlined a possible FTT back in 2013 but has been unable to reach agreement on its introduction. Without that universal agreement, an FTT is effectively inoperable because it is too easily avoided. Adopting the principle of never wasting a crisis, it will be interesting to see if the objections to an FTT are overcome by governments’ need for new sources of revenue.
5. The power and reach of tax authorities will increase.
The final trend that will accelerate is one which has been happening very quietly over the past 10 years since the GFC. That is the swapping of data between tax authorities through initiatives such as FATCA and the OECD’s Common Reporting Standards or the Automatic Exchange of Information.
According to Inland Revenue, since the CRS exchanges started in 2018 it has “received more than 1.5 million records on New Zealand tax residents from 74 jurisdictions.” These records relate to approximately 80,000 New Zealanders. Inland Revenue apparently intends to contact all those for whom it has received information and confirm they have met their obligations.
Separately Inland Revenue has used information sharing agreements with Australia to collect $46 million of overdue child support for the year ended 30th June 2019. In the same year it sent the Australian Tax Office details of 149,031 student loan debtors for matching and obtained contact information for 81,875.
The scale of this information sharing is unprecedented and has happened with very little public debate on the matter. Furthermore, exchanges under CRS are separate to specific information sharing which can happen as part of a double tax agreement between New Zealand and another jurisdiction. No specific data on those information exchanges is made public but anecdotally it is significant.
A little-known feature of the multilateral agreement under CRS is that all signatories agree to undertake to assist in the collection of unpaid tax. Prior to CRS such agreements were negotiated individually as part of a double tax agreement. Under CRS Inland Revenue can now assist any of the other 68 jurisdictions with which it has activated the CRS Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement.
As Inland Revenue’s Business Transformation upgrade continues its data analytic capabilities will increase. My understanding is that the latest upgrade will now enable it to automatically assimilate information it receives under CRS and automatically connect it with taxpayers. This information will only be available to Inland Revenue who can then monitor the taxpayer’s compliance against the data it holds. A question then arises as to the extent Inland Revenue is using artificial intelligence and how that use is being monitored.
Information sharing and the growing use of AI by Inland Revenue and other tax authorities will be a trend about which we should see increasing discussion over the next 10 years. For the moment, citizens appear to be paying little attention to what is happening. How much longer will that inattention will continue? And what are the implications for privacy and democracy? Or is it a case of the ends of higher tax collections justify the means?
Writing about the Easter 1916 Uprising a couple of years before Lenin’s alleged aphorism, Irish poet, W.B. Yates wrote “All changed, changed utterly.” It is indeed all changed, changed utterly and the extent and impact of those changes to the tax landscape will only become clearer over the coming years.
