Nash Stuart: Taxation (Canterbury Earthquake Measures) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Nash Stuart: Taxation (Canterbury Earthquake Measures) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:672;Page:19050] 
STUART NASH (Labour) 
: 
 I am just taking a very short call on the Taxation (Canterbury Earthquake Measures) Bill. I have a couple of questions. Normally what happens with tax bills is that they go to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. We have talked about the very good reason why this bill is not going the Finance and Expenditure Committee but the reason I mention that is that at select committees as members will be well aware members have a chance to talk to officials about why certain things have been drafted and are there or why they are not. In this circumstance I just have a couple of questions. 
If we look at clause 4 in Part 1 which inserts new section CZ 23 into the Income Tax Act we see that it is an amendment to the Income Tax Act 2007. Section CZ 23(1)(f) states that income is exempt if it “is available to another employee who is not an associated person of the employer”—I understand that—“and is or was immediately before a Canterbury earthquake in full-time employment with the employer if the employee is an associated person of the employer;”. I suppose I am asking how the Inland Revenue Department will police this provision or how it will confirm that in fact something that was given to one employee was open to all employees. It might be a very easy test; I am not very sure about that. I suppose I am asking for a bit of clarification that this provision will not be so onerous that a lot of business owners will just throw up their hands and say: “Goodness me we wanted a bit of light relief. That is why we went to the Inland Revenue Department.” The fiscal cost of this is only $3 million so in the scheme of things it is not much. But we do not want to have legislation that is pretty onerous. 
The other point I would like to raise is with regard to section CZ 23(2)(b) to do with the extent of the income exemption. It states that it is to be “less than or equal to $3200 in total if the income is in a form other than accommodation.” I may be wrong here—totally wrong—but I suspect what will happen is that once this legislation is passed a lot of businesses will try to get hold of a copy of it because they will want to know the status of what they have given or the status of their requirements in terms of their provision to the Inland Revenue Department. They will look at this legislation and say: “Oh shivers ‘other than accommodation’—well what does that mean? And ‘less than … $3200’. Oh shivers how am I going to account for this?”. 
I suppose that where I am coming to is that this is a very small bill and I wonder whether it would be practical—and it is a question; it is not a suggestion—maybe to have somewhere in the back a definition of “accommodation”. Again I am not sure how many employers have provided accommodation to their employees or how many employers have actually offered goods to the value of $3200 or even maybe of over that amount. So I really just seek clarification of a lot of this because one of the purposes of this legislation is to provide a level of clarification for businesses that have donated to the people of Christchurch. It is very important; we all know this. It is very important that tax legislation is easy to understand. I suspect that this legislation may be accessed by more people than those who would usually access tax legislation but I could be wrong about that. We could go through this bill if we were really going to draw this debate out and pick all these things out but as I mentioned I am just a little concerned that there may be room to expand on some of the definitions in this bill. Thank you very much.