Tabuteau Fletcher: Taxation (Annual Rates for 2015-16 Research and Development and Remedial Matters) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTabuteau Fletcher: Taxation (Annual Rates for 2015-16 Research and Development and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7651. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): Mr Chair I ask for your forbearance. I will rise many times to speak to this piece of legislation but I just wanted to lay out some generalities.When I last spoke on this piece of legislation I said to the Minister of Revenue that consultation for this type of legislation is essential and not just consultation at this phase. The experts came to the Minister and said “Actually what you need to do for these large omnibus pieces of legislation and these remedial matters pieces of legislation and what would be wise is to come to us early with a draft form of what it is you are trying to achieve so that our industry experts can come in and make fair and reasonable submissions on that draft.”—so that we are not in the position that we are in right now for example.The Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper for the day is about 20 pages of minutiae—changes to clauses and information within the bill. It is a tidy-up. I acknowledge it is fixing up a lot of the changes that have been made subsequently but we continue down a road of necessitating fix up after fix up and we have spoken about unintended consequences on numerous occasions.Speaking specifically to Part 1—I will go straight there—I just want to acknowledge the contribution from the previous speaker Grant Robertson. And actually to be fair I would like to acknowledge the National Government specifically the Minister who is genuinely trying to fix up this large large issue when it comes to the child support payments issue. I acknowledge that he is genuinely trying to fix up this situation.It is a big concern for all New Zealanders and the numbers have already been put to us—70 percent of that debt is kind of backdated penalty fines—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: 75 percent.FLETCHER TABUTEAU: —70 to 75 percent are backdated penalty fines. So when you look at that you understand that there is a problem—there is a problem and it needs to be addressed. But it is a balancing act.I wrote down a few notes and I want to just bring to the Committee’s attention a few issues that would be good to have some clarification on and perhaps the Minister can get up and address it. I noted down clause 57(1). It empowers the commissioner to make what seems to be very arbitrary decisions on the chasing of debt.The problem with this clause is that it allows the commissioner to pursue debt or not based on his call of whether or not the cost of the chase is too great or more specifically relating to the legislation if the pursuit would be an inefficient use of resources.Although that sounds good on paper and when you look at it what is the objective measure? That is New Zealand First’s concern. It makes sense and it looks sensible on paper but what is the objective measure?There was the same concern with the ability for the commissioner to write off debt if he decides it is fair and reasonable to do so. Will the level of what is fair and reasonable change from commissioner to commissioner and dare I say it from case to case? There are some issues there about objective measures and I have spoken previously on that specific issue about exemplars and definitions and the argument of objectivity.I just want to touch on the issue around costs with this specific issue because it is incredibly important to acknowledge that this current Minister has picked up a huge huge issue from the Inland Revenue Department.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: A big bag of steamy stuff.FLETCHER TABUTEAU: I will not go so far as to use that language but it is a big bag of something. The irony of it is that our financial experts did not really factor in that capital cost of implementation and so now we are in that catch-up mode. We are writing—I am not going to say writing off that is the wrong phrase—but we are moving from quarter to quarter kind of adjusting the budgets on the run. So we in New Zealand First acknowledge that there is—