Pugh Maureen; Parker DavidMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you very much Madam Chair. I'll just unmask and enjoy the fresh air. This bill has obviously caught a lot of people by surprise today and with the limited amount of preparation and notice that we've had of course it's been a bit of a challenge working our way through some of the detail. But there are a few things that have become obvious quite early on in the piece and I'm going to turn my attention to clause 5 new section 7AAA. It says in the bill that this scheme is going to be a grant and I just wonder if the Minister can provide other examples where IRD administers and delivers grants to taxpayers or to recipients as it is. The other thing I would like to know follows on from the contribution Simon Court has just made. Now we heard earlier on from Matt Doocey that the IRD is going to need to increase their staffing levels by about 750 people.Simeon Brown: How many?MAUREEN PUGH: Seven hundred and fifty Simeon Brown. And so we do know that that's going to be a challenge to do that recruitment and we are now at the busiest time for Inland Revenue as annual accounts are being finalised for a lot of businesses. So for these businesses we are talking about a lot of them being small businesses and these are the businesses that have been struggling over the last couple of years to even stay afloat. And what we want to be sure of is that their annual accounts are going to be able to be processed in a timely manner and that these people and these businesses will be eligible for this grant. So in terms of the time frames with the delays that we can potentially expect in the processing through Inland Revenue can the Minister please give us some confidence that the recruitment will happen in a timely manner and that it's not going to delay the business as usual for IRD to process those annual accounts? We are talking about the small-business owners—the dairies the cafes that have struggled so hard the tourism operations that have struggled immensely over the last couple of years and we're even talking about farmers. Even farmers may qualify for this grant being under $70000 in profit so we want to be really careful that this is going to be administered efficiently effectively and in a very timely way. Now if that doesn't happen Minister can we also get some acknowledgment from you or confidence from you that these grants can be made retrospectively? If in six months' time annual accounts are still being finalised can they go back and be retrospectively applied for and if they can that's great; if they cannot how can the Minister explain the fairness of that? I have one other point that I'd like to raise while I've got the talking stick and that is about the bank account details that people may not have. The Minister has said that we are going to do some advertising and that there will be media around this and people will apply but if they don't happen to see that—and I do know a lot of very young people that don't necessarily read the news channels on social media or the hard copy papers—and if they don't know about it and find out much later are they still going to be able to apply retrospectively for this grant? Thank you. Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Revenue): I'll endeavour to answer a number of questions from prior questioners. In respect of the self-employed they are included. The assessment is based on their net income which is their gross income less allowable expenses before losses that have been brought forward. In respect of other examples of grants administered by the department of course they were responsible for COVID support payments. In respect of staffing not all of the 750 staff required are new. There will be redeployment of existing staff within the department. As to my confidence as to whether the department can deliver this I think the exceptional work that was done by the department in respect of COVID support payments should give everyone in this House confidence that they will do it well.