Hon Lianne Dalziel
Minister for Small Business

Hon Peter Dunne
Minister of Revenue

18 July 2007 Media Statement

Less taxing approach to registering your company
Changes at the Companies Office and Inland Revenue have dramatically sped up the time it takes to start up a business in New Zealand, Commerce Minister Lianne Dalziel and Revenue Minister Peter Dunne said today.

Businesses can now receive their company IRD number and GST registration online, within minutes of registering their company at the Companies Office website.

"This means setting up a company in New Zealand has become a one-step process that in most instances will take less than an hour to complete", Lianne Dalziel said.

In the past, when people set up a company online at the Companies Office website they could apply for a company IRD number at the same time. That number was sent to them by post. They then had to apply to Inland Revenue directly for GST registration.

"It made sense, therefore, to work with Inland Revenue to streamline and automate the system even further, so that businesses only have to provide one lot of information to the two government departments", Lianne Dalziel said.

In its last Ease of Doing Business Survey, the World Bank rated New Zealand the second easiest place in the world in which to do business and the third easiest place (behind Canada and Australia) in which to set up a business.

"This innovation will be another step in achieving our aim of taking back that number one ranking in both indexes," Lianne Dalziel said.

Revenue Minister Peter Dunne welcomed this compliance cost cutting initiative.

"Inland Revenue is streamlining many aspects of its operations to ensure that compliance requirements are reduced overall, especially for SMEs," Peter Dunne said.

“This has been something of a theme from surveys on compliance costs over the past seven years. It’s clear that businesses find providing the same information to different government departments an unnecessary duplication. In the case of the Companies Office, 99.5 per cent of our clients choose to incorporate over the internet. It was logical to leverage off this experience and to give them the opportunity to allow us to share this information with Inland Revenue in order to speed up the allocation of a tax number,” said Lianne Dalziel.

The Ministers said the initiative is a great example of government departments working together to reduce compliance costs for business.

ENDS

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