Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Mr Deputy Speaker it is a pleasure to be back in Parliament for 2017 and my best wishes to you and also the other Speakers.My privilege tonight is to talk to the Taxation (Business Tax Exchange of Information and Remedial Matters) Bill. This is obviously a very exciting topic and one I find very interesting. I thought I would just slightly refresh because this debate got cut in half with the interlude of Christmas. The four things that this bill is trying to cover are firstly measures to make the taxpaying processes much simpler for businesses; secondly the implementation of the OECD standard around the disclosure of information; thirdly measures to support and enable the deployment of stage one of the IRD's major Business Transformation programme and fourthly of course putting in place the Government's inquiry into foreign trust disclosure rules. The one thing I find most enthralling and interesting about this package is actually what we are trying to do around business and helping New Zealand businesses pay their tax more easily. The key objective of this bill is to simplify the GST process. At the moment you are probably aware that it is a very complicated process but the ability to pay provisional tax in particular is going to be simplified through the accounting and income method which basically means that we will replicate the GST payment system where businesses in New Zealand will pay tax as they go. To my mind that is an excellent process and one probably not fully appreciated by New Zealand businesses and of course the New Zealand economy is dominated by small businesses. So this ability to manage their cash flow against the timing of their tax receipts and the payment to the IRD I think is incredibly important and a fantastic achievement in terms of helping New Zealand businesses.The other area that we are going to deal with is the use of money. There are 67000 companies per year that incur use of money through the late payment of fees or whatever. This bill basically does away with that provision which again is helping New Zealand businesses to create more jobs and make their businesses a lot easier to manage and operate.Then there are some trade-offs around whether people want to deal with debt that is accumulated. This bill actually puts in place some measures to make them able to trade their way out of debt that they may have incurred over time. This involves reform around late-payment penalties and also Working for Families credits. Again those three things are I think very very important for securing and helping smaller businesses in New Zealand.The second thing is of course transparency which we talked about earlier. It is interesting. Just to be very clear about this: what the bill does propose is to require New Zealand financial institutions to review the accounts and collect and report information to the IRD on accounts held by or controlled by non-residents. Of course we have had a lot of publicity around this. I think the reforms that the select committee has been talking about have dealt with this matter very substantially. I think the reforms that are coming through in this bill are excellent and I think it will go a long way towards addressing this issue that we all want to see—namely that everyone pays their fair share of tax. So on that basis I commend the bill. Thank you very much.