Symposium 09 - Tax, saving, welfare and retirement: Have we lost our way?
For the 10 years up to 2000, New Zealand had a broad base, low-rate or comprehensive income tax system, supplemented by a broad-based GST. In this regime, there were some notable departures from neutrality, but saving specifically for retirement was not favoured for tax purposes over other forms of saving such as bank deposits.
This approach was endorsed by the McLeod Committee in the 2001 Tax Review but many changes since then have undermined the principles and created new complexity, distortions and inequities. The welfare/tax interface has provided ongoing problems, made more complex by the transfer to the IRD of many specific welfare measures.
On 12 May 2009, the government announced a new committee of tax experts to assist it in considering the key tax policy challenges facing New Zealand. Symposium 09 provided an Auckland forum to complement the work of that committee, with a particular focus on tax policy in welfare and savings. It therefore debated specific issues relating to saving and retirement and whether New Zealand might re-establish a more neutral and simpler regime based on the accepted principles of the previous decade.
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