McAnulty Kieran; Russell Deborah; Watts SimonHon KIERAN McANULTY (Labour): Point of order Mr Chairperson. I'm just seeking your view on a situation when over an extended period of debate which this is—obviously it started yesterday and this has carried on through to today—if a Minister claims to have answered a question but that is in dispute how would you consider that because I know that the Minister's response to questions—CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): Could you turn this into a point of order and then you could take it as a call. But it's not—Hon KIERAN McANULTY: I'm sorry sir—I did call for a point of order. It might have been missed. Point of order sir. CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): Well my understanding is that this is not a point of order. So if you could actually point to where the order has been disrupted or the Standing Orders or—Hon KIERAN McANULTY: Well sir we understand that a large part of the criteria by which you assess whether an issue has been dealt with is the Minister's engagement with questions. My concern is that as has just happened the Minister has claimed that he has answered the question and it is very much in dispute by members on this side of the Chamber because we believe that just simply touching on the same subject actually isn't answering the questions. So my point of order is a question and that is: how will that be assessed by the Chair? Because if a Minister simply says I've answered that." and that is taken as fact when it is in dispute the concern from members on this side of the Chamber is that that will be deemed as engagement when actually we believe it not to be. CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): Just for the clarity of the committee we do have track sheets. I am trying my best to track from my perspective whether the questions have been addressed or not—hence the reason why I gave you the last call. But we'll take another call. Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair. I'm very grateful to have finally been given a call on this part of the bill. My colleagues have traversed a number of the issues to do with the bill from the point of view of people who might be eligible to receive this rebate. I want to traverse some rather more technical details and I also have a series of questions around the administrative costs for the Inland Revenue Department. Following on from the compliance costs that my colleagues have been talking about I want to move to the administrative costs as to how Inland Revenue (IR) is going to handle this. Looking at the regulatory impact statement (RIS) there's a pretty standard assessment of options sitting on page 14 of the regulatory impact statement—looking at option 1 which is the status quo and option 3 which is expanding the time line for implementation. Now that option 3 was one where the rebate would have flowed through to parents to use early childhood services much more smoothly because it would have involved IR collecting information from early childhood providers and meshing it all together in their fancy information system and then sending refunds out automatically to people who had been paying childcare fees. Now that option was discarded because it would have taken two or three years more to get to it. So that option was not on the table and actually if you think about the kind of IT build that was needed for it that's probably a pretty sensible move to not try to do that kind of thing. The status quo is nothing but then option 2—the basic refund models. We've got this refund model for this rebate. So families have to pay their childcare fees up front they get the receipts from their childcare provider they upload those to the Inland Revenue Department and all going well the Inland Revenue Department sends them some money. But looking through the list of whether or not this is positive or negative the positives in this table are that it increases the income of eligible families which is obviously a positive and they say that there's a potential to promote fee transparency—I'm marginal on that but you know I wouldn't want to override the insights of the officials. But then there's a series of negatives. There's compliance costs for providers—that's a negative. There's compliance costs for customers—it's a double negative. The fiscal cost to the Government is a double negative but you know Governments make choices about where to spend their money. The time required for implementation compared to the status quo—obviously that's a negative. Anything new you're doing does take time. But the one that I'm concerned about is from the point of view of the Inland Revenue Department and there is a double negative on administration costs. I just want to discuss this with the Minister of Revenue a little because there are a number of comments in the regulatory impact statement about how the costs associated with this option are going to affect the Inland Revenue Department. So if we're looking at paragraph 72 of the RIS which is right on the back page it says that Inland Revenue is going to have to be required to develop invoice verification processes. They'll be automated where possible but they're going to have to check that those invoices—actually I'm hoping they're receipts proving that the person using the childcare has actually paid because that's what the model demands. They're going to have to monitor for fraud. There's going to be a bit of an integrity risk as it's going to rely on invoices presented by parents rather than the Inland Revenue Department directly receiving information from the providers. There's a whole set of administrative costs sitting in there for the Inland Revenue Department so what I would like to know from the Minister is just how much more it is going to cost Inland Revenue to process these refunds what kind of consideration that had on the thinking in terms of whether this was the best route to go down and whether those administrative costs are justified and I want to know what sorts of administrative costs have been taken into account. So for example we know that while most of the people claiming this refund will do it with a bit of honesty and integrity there will be those who seek to game the system and to perhaps claim refunds that they're not entitled to. So I'd like to know in terms of the thinking around the administrative costs for the Inland Revenue Department how much thought has been given to how many extra people will be needed in order to police this arrangement because there's a whole set of integrity issues—CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): The member's time has expired. Hon SIMON WATTS (Minister of Revenue): I'm just responding to the member's question in regards to the compliance implications. The member's right. There are scenarios where potentially people will try to test the system. Those considerations have obviously been made by the department and in terms of operational nature and the way in which they respond they will do so appropriately. But it is something that has been considered and is being worked through as part of the process in which we assess to implement this overarching FamilyBoost policy.The reality is that we've outlined—and I outlined it again but I'll say it again: just in terms of the overarching process the balancing factor here was getting those payments into the back pockets of hard-working families as fast as possible acknowledging that there are technical challenges around how we do that. The way which has been recommended by officials is the position which we've landed on. We acknowledge that there are going to be some challenges but we're balancing out the speed of execution versus the ability to ensure that we've got the right measures and balances in place and I think we've got that.CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): The Hon Julie Anne Genter."