01 Sep September News
Who should pay?
It won’t be long, and another election will be on the horizon. Indeed, there has already been policy signalling by some political parties. A key election issue here (and probably also in the US of A) looks very likely to be taxes. Each side of the political spectrum will undoubtedly talk about fairness.
However, one aspect that has proved difficult for successive governments is getting monolithic multi-national companies to a reasonable share of tax.
Take, for example, Google doing an estimated $600 million of sales in NZ during 2018. Yet it only paid $392 thousand, or a paltry 0.065% of tax on its NZ revenue. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal!
Think that’s cheap? Amazon has recently been in the spotlight for paying even less. Apparently, they paid no income tax on $11,200,000,000 of profits. That’s US dollars by the way… This means that Amazon, with billions in profit paid less income tax than you did.
So, while the political parties begin to start dropping the ‘T’ word more often, do take a moment to consider how much less we would all have to pay OR how much better our schools, hospitals and roads could be if there were a ‘fair’ method of taxing these giants.
Health & Safety
It’s been a while since we banged on about Health & Safety. It’s also been a while since the renewed legislation came into effect. Slowly, but surely, Worksafe have transitioned from encouraging people and businesses to stick to the rules, to getting into enforcement. This means prosecutions. These prosecutions do take some time to grind their way through the court system, so expect to see more of these over the coming years.
Some of these prosecutions have been rather black and white. Take the sausage company that had failed to rectify an unsafe piece of equipment that resulted in a broken wrist and ‘degloving’ (when the skin is pulled off the hand), or the juice manufacturer that had a piece of equipment that was missing a key safety feature that ultimately led to an employee’s death. Both pleaded guilty in what were fairly open and shut cases.
There have also been prosecutions that were a little more unclear. One of which involves a horse trainer whose trainee jockey fell from a horse, which left her tetraplegic. While based on some media articles it is difficult to say what level of responsibility her employer should take – was this poor management by them or simply a tragic accident? In this instance, the courts found that the employer was responsible for her fall as they hadn’t ascertained her level of capability. Therefore, there was a guilty verdict and a hefty fine.
Putting this another way: if you are in any way responsible for staff or contractors, you need to give H&S serious consideration, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but if you don’t and there is an incident, Worksafe will take you to the cleaners.
What’s the economy going to do?
There has been lots of conjecture as to what the economy is going to do in the coming months. We’d love to be able to tell you exactly what is going to happen… but we can’t. That’s because we don’t know. And the reality is, most of the commentators are simply taking a semi-educated guess. History shows us that sooner or later, the economy will take a step backward, its just really difficult to accurately predict when.
But you don’t have to leave it up to luck. If we know that sooner or later, the economy will take a backward step, the best thing that we can do is prepare in advance. A great place to start is making sure your spending is less than your income.
