Seymour David; Watts Simon; Parker DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): How much revenue did the 39c tax rate raise over and above what would have been raised by a top tax rate of 33c in the last financial year?SIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): I'm interested now to move to a conversation around IRD's annual report in 2021 around tax debt—specifically the increase in tax debt in the region of 41 percent. We've seen an increase from $3.1 billion in 2018 to nearly $4.4 billion now and the number of people receiving remissions or write-offs from tax debtors has soared: nearly a fourfold increase in the year ended to June 2021 an increase from 26000 people to nearly 112000. And that number while it stabilised this year is still around 43 percent higher than it was higher than in 2020. The other statistic that we can see looking at the Estimates is that there's over 400000 Kiwis now that are carrying tax debt and that I guess as a percentage is equivalent to nearly 10 percent of the working-age population.My question for the Minister of Revenue quite simply in regards to that significant burden of growing debt within our tax system is: in his view doesn't this undermine the integrity of our overall tax system? And what is the Minister doing in order to refocus tax resources in regards to ensuring tax compliance and debt management to protect the integrity of the system? Because off the back of the conversation we've just had around the cost of living payment where the Minister in effect has deployed nearly 800 IRD resources to work on the cost of living payment which I think by all accounts we have seen has been ineffective in regards to dealing with the issue at hand—what is he doing around actually managing the overall tax system which this country is reliant on?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Revenue): Well I think in the context of COVID the Government can be very proud of the achievements by the Inland Revenue Department in respect of tax debt. You know other countries experience tax debt which is around between 7 and 17 percent of their taxation. They carry—Simon Watts: I can read that on the BBC.Hon DAVID PARKER: You say you can read that.Simon Watts: I'm asking for New Zealand.Hon DAVID PARKER: Well I'm about to give you that but I'm putting it in context. The data for New Zealand in 1919 1920 was that overdue debt as a percentage of tax revenue compared with overseas was 5.3 percent—much better than those overseas comparisons. But the news gets even better than that. Notwithstanding that in the last two years under COVID overdue debt as a percentage of tax revenue has decreased further: it went down to 4.5 percent in 2020 2021 and then changed marginally to 4.6 percent in the 2021-22 year. And you might ask yourself: how can those incredibly good results have been achieved in the middle of the complexity for businesses and taxpayers that's been caused by COVID? And the answer is: because the administration of the tax system under this Government has improved. How has it improved? Well we have a lot more automatic assessments so that people don't—David Seymour: You got better at taking people's money.Hon DAVID PARKER: Oh he says we've got better at taking people's money. No we've actually got better at helping people neither pay too much tax or less than they owe. And people appreciate that. They like the fact that they have automated systems that better calculate their payments of tax during the year so that at the end of the year there's no wash-up payment necessary for them. Working for Families payments are generally more accurate than they used to be. People can get a personalised tax code now rather than paying secondary tax and pay too much tax during the year or perhaps too little and have to either pay more at the end of the year or get a refund. Now they can get a personalised tax number that better reflects their incomes. So for all of those reasons I'm pleased to assure the committee that rather than tax debt being a problem we've got the remarkable circumstance that not only are we lower than those international averages we are further lower compared with them than was the case pre-COVID when most other countries are going the other direction.Final point I would make is that one of the reasons why that is the case is that businesses in New Zealand are sound. Unemployment is very very low at about 3.5 percent. Very very low so people can afford to pay their bills. They can afford to employ people obviously because unemployment is so low. And they're not racking up lots of tax debt because their finances are good enough for them to be paying their taxes as they fall due—I think something that I'm sure on this side of the Chamber we celebrate.