Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you very much Mr Chair. I wanted to focus a little bit on clause 52 and the country-by-country reports that are being requested. The idea here of course is to ensure that a New Zealand - headquartered multinational group with consolidated funds of €750 million in revenue for the previous year furnish the IRD with information on their global earnings. Now it's interesting actually in the briefings that it's been stated that this would apply to about 20 multinational groups. I'm a little bit pleased and surprised to learn that there are 20 such companies of scale in New Zealand and maybe there are more. That probably is a reflection of the robust health of the economy that we've seen over the last nine years and I do hope that that continues that way under this Government where business confidence is falling.I suppose the primary question I have to the Minister—well before I get to that the point of this is that by requiring that these multinational companies give information about the gross revenues and profits income tax paid income tax accrued stated capital accumulated earnings number of employees and tangible assets in each of the countries in which they operate the idea is that then the IRD will share that information with other nations not so that they can do their tax assessment directly—we're not asking for that level of detail—but just to give them a broad idea so that they can have a clearer idea of the overall tax picture and make further inquiries if they need to in other countries.So the primary question I have for the Minister is: how confident is he that New Zealand will get useful information on the many hundreds of multinational companies based elsewhere in the world who have operations in New Zealand so that the information that we receive will be useful in our collecting of tax by multinationals that are not based in New Zealand but operate in New Zealand? So that's the primary question: how confident are we that we will get useful information from other countries? I presume it's only a certain number of countries that have signed up to this and that that would be a moving feast. I'd be keen to get an indication from the Minister as to what percentage of those companies in terms of overall coverage in terms of major companies operating in New Zealand which are subsidiaries of multinational companies in the rest of the world and that operate in New Zealand will be covered by reciprocal relationships and reciprocal information that flows through this country-by-country reporting that we obviously expect other countries to be doing as well as us. I'd be interested to know the projected time line I suppose as to when we think we will start to get that sort of useful information from other countries because we're doing this. New Zealand has always been a good global citizen and been prepared to make our effort in order to ensure that there is good cross-country cooperation and understanding of how the taxation burden is met by multinational companies. So we're doing this and we're passing this law in the next few days and it's been largely a bipartisan law because we are keen to make sure it works. What I'm keen to understand is whether we are going to actually get useful information from other countries out of this that will help us; who they are; roughly what the percentage of overall revenue for such companies will be covered by countries that are helping us in this area; and what the time frame is for our expected flow of information. I'd be very interested to hear from the Minister and to get a sense of that.