Clark David: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10648. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): What a hard act to follow. I mean I think Mr Faafoi has put his finger on something there that warrants further consideration. It does feel like the Government has been involved in a cover-up here. I know he has put it up for debate but just from the cheap seats it does feel a little like there might be something that is not quite above board going on there.I want to speak about the State Services Commission a little and about the way it has investigated the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment payroll fiasco and other associated fiascos. Here is a little bit of background. We found out in the last month or so that the ministry’s payroll system has not being paying people appropriately for a number of years.Hon David Parker: Which Minister?Dr DAVID CLARK: That is Minister Joyce’s responsibility. He is the Minister for Economic Development who is responsible for the Ministry of Business—Hon David Parker: Is that new—“Novo new”?Dr DAVID CLARK: Ha ha! My colleague asks whether it is “Novo new”. The Minister is responsible for fixing a few things around the place and appears not to have done quite as diligent a job as one might hope from a Government that has been here now for going on 8 years. What has transpired—what has come to light—is the way in which the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has not been paying their staff correctly despite being the very organisation in New Zealand that is responsible for making sure that everyone else pays their staff correctly. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment’s payroll system has not been working we learn since the ministry was set up—since a couple of ministries were taken together and a new payroll system created out of the merger of several payroll systems—and since that time staff have not been paid correctly. Police had a similar issue and they have now paid we are told over $30 million in back-pay—$30 million because they were not paying their staff correctly. They have admitted the error; they have looked into it.The State Services Commission said that it started looking into these and similar issues in 2014. My questions and my concerns are whether the State Services Commission has been doing its job correctly whether it has been resourced correctly to do that job and whether it is competent from here on in to deal with the fallout that has been and is being created on an ongoing basis because we have seen very little action from the Minister Steven Joyce who has now said that he understands the problem that his department has. What he has not said—6 months on from being advised that his department had set up an inquiry into this matter—is that he has no estimate none whatsoever of what this is going to cost the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. Six months on and he has none—he has no idea. He does not know whether it is going to be $30 million like it was in Police or less or more. And what is worse until his ministry gets it right it is very hard for it to then go around waving its finger at others.We have since learnt that Fonterra—a little outfit called Fonterra—and another one called McDonald’s in New Zealand are both investigating their payrolls in case they have similar errors. We know that New Zealand Post went through the court system to address similar errors all the way to the Court of Appeal. The Government does not seem to have made any estimate of how widespread the problem that it is overseeing is.The State Services Commission does not seem to be resourced sufficiently. When the State Services Commission was asked whether it had confidence that all Government departments were complying with the law and that it had sought and received assurances from them it was not willing to go that step further and say that it had itself examined those payrolls to see that they were complying with the law. So we have the deeply hypocritical if I can say situation where the ministry responsible for overseeing the law has itself been in breach of that very same law. And this points to a Government that is in disarray. It points to a Government that if it does not believe that is a real issue is out of touch with ordinary and middle New Zealanders.It has been revealed that this Government—which has not estimated that cost—has known about the problem since 2010. The Minister Michael Woodhouse admitted that in 2010 a group was set up to try to resolve this issue—to work through complications created by payroll systems that made it difficult for employers to comply with the law. But it seems that nothing has been done since 2010 and since that time the Government has been in breach of the law.Reports noted.