Tony Morris: Inland Revenue spokesperson on the horticulture sector not paying enough tax

The Inland Revenue Department has unveiled the horticulture sector hasn't paid their fair share of taxes.

Over the last 10 months, the IRD has found $45 million dollars of undeclared tax - and almost 100 audits are in the works now, within the sector.

Inland Revenue spokesperson Tony Morris says the department is seeing people being paid under the table, undeclared cash sales and withholding tax going unrecorded or not being deducted correctly

"It's quite a complex industry - if there's payments going through with cash or what else, it's easy to get lost or for things to happen intentionally, where it's hard to track the money."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
Now.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
The IID has caught the horticulture industry underpaying taxes to
the tune of forty five million dollars. Tony Morris is
a spokesperson for IID with us now, Hey, Tony the
head very well, thank you. Is it more than you
were expecting.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
A little bit more for the tenants so far? But
it is an industry where there's a risk of tax
not being paid well, either intentionally or not intentionally.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Why is it a risk for this industry, Well.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
It's an industry where there's plenty of cash. There's sort
of a transient workforce, so the growers need to employ
lots of different people, not for a whole year, at
different times. So what we see in the industry is
the growers who need people to pick for them, they
tend to employ a contracting firm who employ all the pickers,

(01:06):
and the contracting firm that times can actually also contract
to another contracting firm to contract to the Because it's
quite a complex industry and if there's payments going through
with cash or what else, it's easy to sort of
get lost or things that happen intentionally. It's hard to
attract the money and not all the taxes paid correctly.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
So how did you crack down on this? Is this
basically because you've got that extra funding for enforcement.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
S acenario that we've been looking at for a few years.
I mean, working cross government to try and come up
with some solutions, but certainly the excellent using some of
the extra money as well to increase what we're doing
over the next year or so. So a bit both really,
but certainly something that's something that we need to keep
working on.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, how do you put the cibosh on this?

Speaker 2 (01:54):
It's one of those tricky problems. Certainly we're doing audits
where we need to and investigations, but the more we
can do to actually try and get the paid TAXT
early is the best results. So what we've seen over
ours years, we're trying to actually work with the growers
who you know who generally are doing the right thing,
and I want to make the industry safe and working

(02:14):
with the industry to put more on them to make
sure that they can either withhold texts from the contracting
firms or make sure the contracting firms are viable and
compliant and similar with the contracting firms around when they're
paying the pickers, they're deducting texts early, so we're not
leaving the text to come from the pickers at the
end of the day, but trying to get the text

(02:35):
early on as the money's been passed across a joint problem.
But it's one of those ones that we can educate
people get the text early in the transactions. That's the
best way for us to go.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Good stuff, Tony, best of luck with it. I really
appreciate your time, Tony Morris and Land Revenue Department.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
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