English BillHon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): I am interested that the member Stuart Nash was referring to the Business Transformation project in the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) and various tax issues because the large-scale transformation that is under way in IRD is going to significantly improve the ability of that organisation—and therefore of the Government—to deal with some of the issues that he raised though not all of them. We will see IRD's technology platform completely rebuilt from the ground up; integrated much more effectively with the private sector systems that are around particularly those that service businesses; and incorporating a great deal more flexibility for policy and policy change. As the member indicated there is a significantly outstanding amount of overpaid tax. One of the features of the system is that it will move tax more towards real time—that is people being able to understand their tax liability in real time and the business sector being able to pay when it has the cash to do so so understanding its tax obligations on a day-to-day basis almost certainly month-to-month and being able to pay the tax when it has the ability to do so. Since these are the collection of votes around finance and government administration that is just one of the transformation projects that are rewiring Government as funded by all of these different votes. Even Cabinet has now got CabNet which is electronic—you do not need Cabinet papers actually. But other large agencies are going through somewhat similar but not quite as comprehensive a process as IRD—ACC the Ministry of Social Development the Ministry of Education. The whole concept of the data-driven tools around social investment are certainly going to have a significant impact on Government over the next couple of years and in fact already are. But a feature of all of them—the whole lot of them—is that they are focused on better results and better services for New Zealanders. The Government brings to the decisions related to these votes a very strong customer focus. For instance one of the primary benefits that we are aiming for from the IRD revamp is that all those low and middle income New Zealand families who find themselves caught in a web of complexity of all the income support systems—by which I mean the fact that they are repaying a student loan qualify for Working for Families are on and off benefits may be involved with child support and/or are getting early childhood education subsidies. Those families find it pretty difficult actually to understand the impact of any given decision—the decision to take another shift at work the decision for the mother of a child to return to work—because the tax system in some instances cannot tell them for 18 months what the end result of that decision is. This has the basic effect that a lot of them do not take up the entitlements that they could in case they end up incurring debt—getting a $500 debt 12 months down the track that they did not anticipate can have quite a big impact on that household. We could say the same about quite a lot of the investment that the Government is bringing to bear. I just want to note here as we are dealing with Vote State Services the work of the previous State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie who finished last week. He did an excellent job of guiding the Public Service through what has been the most successful fiscal consolidation in the developed world—not just because the Government has got back to surplus on the efforts of the Public Service but because it is sustainable. We are able to continue to provide a higher level of service better customer satisfaction and better results for New Zealanders and I want to acknowledge Iain Rennie's contribution.