Nash Stuart: Taxation (Annual Rates for 2015-16 Research and Development and Remedial Matters) Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionNash Stuart: Taxation (Annual Rates for 2015-16 Research and Development and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8883. Text is subject to correction.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Yes it is Mr Chair. You are dead right there. This is one of those bills where I think it is worth spending just a couple of minutes going over the crux of this because—Hon Ruth Dyson: A couple of minutes just saying the name of the bill.STUART NASH: Exactly. It is one of those bills Ruth Dyson where it is very very technical in some parts but very very important in other parts. By and large Labour had agreed with the majority of the bill. We spoke in favour of a lot of the bill. We had a number of concerns but there was one part of the bill that we did not agree with—I would just like to go over this if you will indulge me—and that was the setting of the annual rates.What this bill does is it actually sets the tax rates for the following fiscal year. It is actually retrospective of course because the Budget has been passed but we believed that those rates were inequitable and that is the reason why we had great difficulty supporting this bill in its entirety. If I remember rightly David Clark—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are actually on Part 4. What you are mentioning is in Part 2. We have already handled Part 2. We are on Part 4.Hon Ruth Dyson: Gosh it was a long time ago.STUART NASH: Miss Ruth Dyson is dead right. It was a long time ago. I just wanted to bring those who are watching this on television up to speed. This is the first week back and a lot of people have been looking forward to the resumption of the debate on this tax bill. They are probably sitting there with bated breath. Like myself they have picked up the bill for the first time in nearly 2 months and they have said: “Now goodness me. Now what was that bill about again?”. That is exactly what I did.I remember when we left this House when the debate ended we were in full flight. We were going hell for leather. Part 4 was—we were like a horse galloping and then we were stopped in mid-stride. We have had to get back on that metaphorical horse and just really get things going.So here we are. We are looking at Part 4. This is amendments to other enactments and thiseffects by and large the amendments to the Tax Administration Act 1994—a very important piece of tax legislation that basically sets the scene for a number of pieces of tax legislation as I was saying.But there is one thing I would like to talk about and this is clause 230. This is statements in relation to research and development loss tax credits and it says something that I think we should be slightly concerned about. The reason I say that is we were debating this in the Finance and Expenditure Committee just today. What it says in proposed new section 70C(1) is that “A person must file by electronic means in the form and electronic format prescribed by the Commissioner a statement in relation to—”.What that does is it sets out a number of statements that obviously you have to file this in relation to but the interesting thing about this is that it is very prescriptive. It says that “A person must file by electronic means”. The reason why I think that this is quite important and we need to tease this out a little bit is that at the Finance and Expenditure Committee today actually when discussing another tax bill and looking at the ramifications of not the coming digital age but the digital age that we are in at this point in time the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) made a very good point when it said that it is not going to require people under this tax legislation to just submit by electronic means.What the IRD said is that it understands that not everyone is on email and not everyone has access to electronic means so we are still going to allow the option of submitting in writing. So if a taxpayer wants to they can go to an IRD office—there actually are not many of those left because you closed them all down. But what they can do I suspect is they can probably go to a citizens advice bureau or somewhere where someone will download the IRD forms they will print them out and they will give them to this taxpayer. He or she can then go back to wherever they came from and fill out the form put it in the thing called an envelope put this thing called a stamp on it and post it to the IRD.The IRD was quite clear that this was an important process. A number of members in the Government will remember this debate. We all agreed that at this point in time we could not be so prescriptive as to discount the ability of taxpayers to submit a written form whereas this provision says that it must be done in an electronic format. I am sort of wondering why this legislation is a little bit out of step.