Clark DavidCOMPANIES (LEVIES) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingHon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister for State Owned Enterprises): I present a legislative statement on the Companies (Levies) Amendment Bill. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website. Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: I move That the Companies (Levies) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 10 November 2022.The Government's intention in introducing this bill is very simple: it's to give the New Zealand Companies Office the ability to charge users of those registry services levies as well as fees as it does now. It needs the ability to be able to charge for the services that it provides. The new levies which will be set by regulations after public consultation will help the Companies Office run its registry services in a modern efficient and transparent way. As members of this House will recall two weeks ago on Budget night the Companies Office Registers Funding Validation Bill 2022 was passed under urgency. During the passage of that legislation I explained to the House the difficulties that our Companies Office has run into with its funding. In a nutshell it's been moving funding between registers in a way that is not in line with the legislation or with the expectations of the Parliament or indeed as intended by Parliament when the process was originally set up.As I explained to the House on Budget night since we discovered the issue last year the Government's been working on short- medium- and longer-term solutions to the issue. Essentially that boils down to two statutes. The first of those was passed on Budget night and I want to thank members across the House for their support with that retrospective validating legislation that validated the collection and use of fees by the Companies Office. The second piece of legislation is this levies bill we're looking at now which looks forward provides a long-term funding solution to help the Companies Office to efficiently administer its registers.I'm pleased in a way that we're able to turn a problem here into an opportunity—an opportunity to move the Companies Office forward. Originally it was there with a few paper-based registers that it was designed to oversee. Of course the world moved on. Today it administers 16 different online registers and they include registers of entities such as companies incorporated societies and retirement villages professional services registers for licensed auditors and insolvency practitioners and registers for disclosure of financial products and security interests over personal property.So by effectively managing those registers what the Companies Office does is not only make that information available to the public as it's needed or required but also helps to build trust and confidence in the transparent fair and easy domain. We pride ourselves in New Zealand as a place that's easy to do business but it's important to be also recognised for transparency and fairness. So the Companies Office thereby provides wider benefits as well by also registering not-for-profits and providing the public with access to important information. The Companies Office has of course over all that time taken on more and important responsibilities as I've outlined. But it's also had to with that make the most of the advances that have come about through modern information technologies. So its evolutions have been of significant value making it easier and quicker for people to interact with the Companies Office and search online for information they need from the registers. And although the Companies Office has been growing and evolving we've still got the original legislation which speaks to how it's funded and it is time to update that.As it stands the Companies Office is still required by legislation to charge and use money collected as fees separately for each of its 16 different registers. Money collected from users can't be used to fund the administration of another register—that's the way the legislation is currently drafted. It can't pool any of those funds to use for the good of the registry systems as a whole nor to make things fairer for the smaller users of registry systems; for example the incorporated societies trusts and others that also use registry systems. So once regulations are set using the levy-making power in the bill the Companies Office will be able to collect and use money more flexibly across the registry system as a whole and that will lead to more appropriate and efficient use of the money by the Companies Office.Due to the need to move quickly towards a new funding model for the Companies Office we've introduced this bill without public pre-consultation on the underlying policy. And I have to say as Minister I'm very conscious of that. The users of the registry will want to have a say in how the registry operates and how the levy-making power is used and how much they of course each will need to pay when they use the register in future. So I'm pleased therefore that they'll be able to participate in the select committee process of this bill in the coming months. That will provide the opportunity for the public for users of the various registries to have their say and perhaps more importantly again the bill provides for a requirement that before any levies are set by regulations themselves there needs to be a full consultation with those who are affected. The consultation will cover who is charged and how much what the money is intended to be used for and why and how the levies will be paid.As well as consultation the bill provides other safeguards to make sure that the levies are set at a fair and appropriate level. These include principles that have to be adhered to and an express stipulation that the Companies Office cannot collect more money from users than it needs to recover its overall costs. So you can see that the framework as it's set out in the legislation is aiming to achieve a fair and efficient system—one that will support the registers to operate efficiently provide transparently the information that people would seek from them and to do it in a way that does not collect more money than is required to fund the use of the system.So I'm looking forward to the committee's consideration and report back to the House of this bill and I commend this bill to the House.