Source: New Zealand Parliament – Hansard
Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Mr Chair, I am looking forward to hearing the Minister’s answers on some of these questions. We’ve raised two questions so far in which, hopefully, we’ll be getting an answer from the Minister.
There’s another section on which I would like to get some guidance from the Minister as to what is going on here. I want to direct the Minister’s attention to Part 3—it’s clause 72 that I want to have a look at, which the Minister will find on page 80. It inserts new section 92BA of the Income Tax Act. What it does here—just looking at this new section—is it talks about taxpayers being required to provide a multinational top-up tax return for a fiscal year. So, just to remind people what’s going on here, under the global anti-base erosion rules, is that in countries which are brought into these rules—and there’s quite a few of them—multinational enterprises are required to pay a minimum level of tax, and that’s assessed in a couple of ways. If they don’t pay that minimum level of tax, they have to pay a top-up tax—in this case, to Inland Revenue in New Zealand, for multinational enterprises that are a part of this in New Zealand. The taxpayers are required to provide a multinational top-up tax return—so an ordinary old tax return like most of us have to do; instead, it’ll be rather more complicated for a multinational enterprise.
But, first of all, they must make an assessment of the amount payable. So the taxpayer themselves—the multinational enterprise themselves—has to make an assessment of the tax payable. In other words, the multinational enterprise has to assess their own tax themselves. I’m just curious about that, because we heard from the Minister yesterday, in Part 2, that these multinational enterprises also have case managers at the Inland Revenue Department. Those case managers, obviously, see what the multinational—in fact, the Minister was telling us that the fact they had case managers was going to make it easier for the multinational enterprises to comply with the law, because the case managers would be able to ensure that the multinational enterprise knew where they could find the rules and so on. But that is interesting, because that, to me, was the case manager getting involved in the assessment of tax, but here, in this clause, we have the taxpayer being required to make an assessment themselves of the amount of tax that they ought to pay. So there’s a little bit of a tension there, I suppose, as to what’s going on. I want to understand what’s going on there with the multinational enterprises, as to why they are assessing the taxes themselves.
So they provide the return, and then the assessment is dated at the date that the return is received at the office of the department. So, basically, the multinational enterprise assesses their own tax and puts it in a return—so there’s some process going on there whereby they assess their own tax—but then the date at which the assessment is made, now this is in 92BA(2), is the date on which the return is received. Now, that’s a little bit confusing, and I’d like the Minister to explain just exactly how that works. First of all, they are assessing their own tax, but then the assessment is made when the tax is received at the department. On the face of it, that looks confusing. It looks a little bit odd, and I would like the Minister to explain exactly what is going on in that process, just so we can be sure that these global anti-base erosion rules are going to work fairly for everyone. Thank you.
