News

More ACC levy cuts on govt’s agenda

05.12.13

More ACC levy cuts on govt’s agenda

The government expects to announce more ACC levy reductions, on top of Monday’s $387 million cut.

Those cuts mean households will be on average $200 a year better off in the 2014/15 year.

“As we become more confident that the scheme’s performance is sustainable in the long run, higher levy cuts become more likely,” ACC Minister Judith Collins said.

“The government is on track to deliver further levy cuts in 2015/16.”

The cuts announced on Monday follow a recommendation by ACC chairwoman Paula Rebstock due to ACC’s improved financial situation.

Ms Collins says the ACC Earners Account (paid by workers) and the ACC Work Account (paid by employers) are fully funded due to ACC’s “astute financial management, outstanding investment performance and dedication to effective rehabilitation”.

“The average New Zealand household can expect to keep just over $200 each year,” she said.

She said small businesses would be around $180 better off annually, and larger employers would receive a $6000 reduction on average.

ACC’s Motor Vehicle Account levies, incorporated into car registration and petrol prices, will remain the same as that account is not yet fully funded.

Cuts for vehicle owners are expected from July 1, 2015.

Labour ACC spokesman Iain Lees-Galloway last week accused National of creating “a phoney crisis” and raising ACC levies to create a huge surplus and belatedly allowing them to fall.

 

Derived from: http://msn.co.nz/, Posted: 03/12/2013

Good Manners = Good Business

21.11.13

Good Manners = Good Business

Etiquette queen June Dally-Watkins isn’t the only one who’s concerned about emails eroding that personal touch – business leaders awarding contracts feel the same way.

A failure to return phone calls, a poorly written email and not setting aside time to meet in person isn’t just rude – it’s also bad for business, a Galaxy Research survey commissioned by virtual office group Servcorp has found.

“Nothing says more clearly to a client or prospect that they are just another item on your to-do list than being too busy to return a voicemail or receiving a rushed typo-ridden email,” Servcorp’s chief operating officer Marcus Moufarrige said.

Some 78 per cent of the 457 business leaders surveyed said the failure to return calls could affect their decision on awarding a contract.

More than half – or 58 per cent – said poorly written emails with grammatical errors and typos may also affect their choice.

One-third of the leaders could hinge their decision on the failure to set aside time to meet in person.

Mr Moufarrige said it was worrying to see businesses prioritising their needs over those of their clients.

“Australian companies could be putting future growth prospects at risk by using technology in isolation,” he said.

Ms Dally-Watkins, who is also a veteran business leader in the finishing school field, has long deplored the decline in face-to-face communication as technology compromises manners.

Derived from: Stuff.co.nz Posted: 12.11.2013

Carving out new skills at workshop

10.09.13

 Carving out new skills at workshop

A group of women enjoyed a girls weekend with a difference – working with power tools, dust and wood to create a plywood table and stool set.

Wakapuaka’s Centre for Fine Woodworking ran one of its popular workshops at the weekend, where students get to create the furniture. It was the fifth course it had run but the participants in last weeks course by chance ended up being all women.

Helen Gerry who does administration and handles enrolments for the centre said the centre had quite a lot of female students in the past but this was the first time this had happened. She said the course was quite intensive and it was not the cruisy girls’ weekend that some of the participants might have expected.

Helen said furniture maker and tutor Mike Hindmarsh had designed a clever slot-together table made with routers and jigsaws and no gluing.

They had been overwhelmed with interest in the course. Helen said it was great to celebrate an all girls woodworking get together.

“We are always hearing comments from female visitors and students who say ‘I never did woodworking at school’ or ‘My dad wouldn’t let me go in his shed'”

Helen said some of the women on the course had come from around the South Island to take part in the course as part of a girly get-together.

For more information on the course visit cfw.co.nz

Derived from : The Nelson Leader, September 5 2013

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Region’s economy is on an upswing

23.05.13

Region’s economy is on an upswing

Nelson’s economic growth is ahead of big city Auckland.

The region has been a quiet achiever in economic growth, says ANZ economist Steve Edwards.

The ANZ Regional Trends report shows Nelson-Marlborough achieved the second highest year-on-year growth to March at 3.8 per cent, ahead of Auckland on 2.6 per cent and behind Canterbury’s 5.6 per cent.

The top of the south’s 3.8 per cent growth is a five-year high.

Mr Edwards said the region had a well-balanced economy.

While there had been patches of growth in Auckland and Canterbury focused on what was happening in the housing market, Nelson and Marlborough had other indicators growing. These included commercial building work, retailing and exports.

Nelson-Marlborough recorded a 3.4 per cent rise in retail sales in the March quarter. Compared with the same period a year earlier, sales in the region have increased 14 per cent. The report said a lift in new car registrations partly explained this strength – registration numbers increased 9 per cent in the three months to April, and were up 18 per cent on the same three months a year earlier.

Employment in the region increased 0.6 per cent in the latest survey of households. While dwarfed by the 1.7 per cent rise measured nationally, the latest increase follows four consecutive quarterly declines in employment in the region. The unemployment rate eased from a 12-year high of 5.2 per cent in December to an 18-month low of 4.1 per cent in March.

The number of commercial building permits issued in Nelson-Marlborough increased 14 per cent in the March quarter, in contrast to a modest decline nationally.

The equivalent series for residential permits was unchanged between December and the latest quarter.

The real estate market had been subdued over recent months, the report said. House sales, house prices and section sales were all 1 per cent lower in the three months to April, and rural real estate sales eased 3 per cent.

The only bright spot came via a reduction in the average length of time it took to sell a house, which quickened to 33 days in – a 3 1/2-year low for the series.

Nationwide there was a 2 per cent rise in economic activity in the first three months this year, which was a reasonably strong rate of increase, said Mr Edwards. The same pace of growth was also measured for both the North and South islands.

”We are seeing signs of a housing boom affecting Auckland and Canterbury spreading to other regions,” he said.

Derived from: Stuff.co.nz Posted: 22.5.2013

Tax crackdowns threaten Channel Islands’ haven status

15.05.13

Tax crackdowns threaten Channel Islands’ haven status

St Helier marina in Jersey, a still-thriving tax shelter for the UK’s non-dom super-rich. Extracted from: The Guardian, UK News

Only in private will a small number of Channel Islands politicians and businessmen betray any trace of personal misgivings about the manner in which the local finance industry trades on complex tax structures to help big business and super-rich individuals cut their tax bills.

“When a horse falls from heaven you don’t check its teeth, do you?” said one government figure, who asked not to be named. “And the finance industry is like that here.”

Five years ago, at its peak, the value of assets held through Jersey – its offshore banks, trusts and investment funds – was estimated at £700bn-£800bn, according to the island’s former chief adviser Colin Powell. The figure is equivalent to about half of the UK’s annual economic output.

If the past five years of global financial turmoil have not entirely passed the islands by, they have left them relatively unscathed, even though the economic output of Jersey’s financial sector has shrunk by almost a third.

While other small nations with large banking sectors, such as Iceland and Ireland, have been undone by their reckless lending practices, the debt-free Channel Islands have always positioned themselves as dependable repositories of riches.

From the start of the 1970s, the Channel Islands enjoyed almost four decades of near-uninterrupted growth, driven by ballooning financial activity. Bank deposits grew from £500m in 1970 to £220bn in 2007.

Over the same period the number of active companies incorporated on the island rose from about 550 to more than 33,000, including FTSE 100 firms such as Glencore, Shire Pharmaceuticals and advertising group WPP.

For workers in St Helier, however, perhaps the most lucrative corner of Jersey’s financial sector is the offshore trusts industry catering to the international super-rich. Efforts by Britain to prevent its wealthy residents from using Jersey trusts to shelter assets from the taxman date back at least to the 1920s. Today, Jersey and Guernsey attract wealth from across Europe, the Middle East and beyond, as well as being the jurisdictions of choice for the UK’s non-domiciled super-rich – the wealthy figures who have told Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs they are not permanently based in Britain for tax purposes.

With no register of trusts, the Jersey authorities do not know how many such ownership vehicles exist, who owns them, or what assets they control.
But John Harris, director-general of the Jersey Financial Services Commission (JFSC), is furious at critics who suggest such opacity opens the door to international tax evasion. He said the 180 companies that administer offshore trusts are tightly regulated, required to know the source of funds, who set up the trust, who are the beneficiaries, and to meet strict anti-money laundering criteria.

Harris claimed there was a “prejudice against trusts” simply because they offered a “legitimate degree of confidentiality, no different to bank accounts”. Asked how many trusts were administered on the island, he said: “Nobody knows … It’s probably tens of thousands.” Responsibility for ensuring all comply with regulations lies with just 675 trust company directors recognised by the JFSC.

Mounting international pressure to throw more light on the offshore trust industry has led Jersey and Guernsey to sign a string of co-operation agreements with countries around the world, allowing overseas tax authorities to request information where they can demonstrate a suspicion of improper tax arrangements. Failure to sign up to these agreements would have put the islands on a G20 blacklist.

Such agreements have been criticised by some for not giving enough powers to overseas tax authorities. The US, which has signed deals with Jersey and Guernsey, has developed its own, more aggressive disclosure demands on offshore financial firms handling the assets of American citizens, which start to become active from next year.

Jersey and Guernsey signed tax co-operation agreements with the UK in 2009 but HMRC told the Guardian it had not yet made a single tax inquiry through this route, though it is expected to in future. Senior figures in the Channel Islands say criticism of offshore trusts from British politicians particularly sticks in their craw because much of the industry exists to service the special tax arrangements that thousands of super-rich non-doms have entered into with the UK government.

“If Jersey did not administer these funds they would most likely flow to another offshore centre that would not provide the same return to the UK,” said Geoff Cook, Jersey Finance’s chief lobbyist.

Many UK non-doms using Jersey trusts have also used offshore companies to avoid stamp duty on the sale of UK expensive properties – another practice George Osborne pledged to outlaw in his March budget. Ben Newman of IFG Trust, a Jersey arm of stock market-listed IFG Group, this month told a conference of trustees: “A number of trust companies on the island have this as a significant part of their portfolio and, as such, changes here could have a major impact on their businesses and possible structuring requirements.”

Jersey’s treasury minister, Philip Ozouf said “It is not up to us to close the loopholes. These are UK taxpayers using UK loopholes and it’s up to the UK to change them. We can’t legislate for around the world.”

Meeting the Guardian before the furore, Ozouf proudly points to the long esplanade that faces out onto the Channel in the centre of St Helier, naming the financial institutions that occupy plots where once stood potato warehouses loading produce on to ships. “You don’t put bread on the table by running an agricultural economy. Jersey has no natural resources apart from its nice beaches and countryside. It’s got these to work with … [he taps his temples] … brains.

“Did people come here with suitcases full of cash in the 1970s? Of course they did. Was tax evasion widespread? Of course it was. But Jersey moved away from all that a long time ago.”

But as the Carr furore has shown, popular opinion in the UK cares little for nice distinctions between illegal evasion and clever artificial schemes to reduce tax bills for the wealthy while remaining within the letter of the law. The same message is now coming through in a barrage of tax and regulatory crackdowns around the world that collectively threaten to erode the foundations of the Jersey and Guernsey economies.

Channel Islands locator

Back from a tour of the islands this month, Lord McNally, the justice minister with responsibility for the UK relations with its Crown Dependencies, told the Guardian he had left locals in no doubt that the days of Britain turning a blind eye to aggressive loophole industries in the Channel Islands were over. “Treasuries all over are making tough decisions in these difficult times,” is his message to the Channel Islands.

Following a series of tough measures in the March budget, he recalls being asked: “Is this the last time [the UK] Treasury is going to come stopping us doing things?”

He replied: “No. The Treasury will continue to do its job.”

Many in the Channel Islands bridle at such language, pointing to the huge money flows coursing from the island to the City of London, helping to support the UK’s largest banks, not least RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, in which the British taxpayer has major stakes.

A report for the Treasury found that more than $300bn (£190bn) was flowing from bank branches and subsidiaries in Jersey and Guernsey up to UK head offices three years ago.

Jersey’s treasury minister Ozouf said: “We’re a secondary centre to London. We collect deposits from around the world … and we provide about $200bn of liquidity to the UK banking system. We argue that liquidity is as important to the UK economy as quantitative easing has been.”

This message, island ministers believe, is quietly heeded by wise heads in Whitehall. But there is a limit to how much local politicians can bite their tongues in the face of what are seen as cheap political attacks trashing Jersey’s reputation. In March, the islands took the extraordinary step of using British courts in an attempt to stop Osborne closing a loophole in VAT rules for online retailers which is said to be costing the UK exchequer £110m a year.

The legal challenge was unsuccessful and retailers were blocked from shipping VAT-free from the islands two months ago. Freight levels have plummeted and hundreds of warehouse job losses have followed.

The blow comes as the islands’ political establishments are still smarting from the impact of a Brussels directive to stamp out “harmful” tax policies, among which were seen to be the special corporation tax deals offered by Guernsey and Jersey to overseas companies.

This fundamental attack on the islands’ offshore economic model began to bite three years ago, forcing a radical reshaping of public finances. Jersey faced a 20% hole in its tax take. Desperate to remain an attractive offshore hub, politicians sought to plug the deficit with a regressive VAT-sales tax and deep cuts in spending.

Looking to the future, bold changes to the regulation of UK banks and new European rules for hedge funds are also a concern. Meanwhile, Brussels has again identified “harmful” elements in both Jersey and Guernsey’s revised fiscal arrangements.

Increasingly radical policies to combat tax avoidance and evasion are being drafted by governments across the western world. While the Channel Islands regard themselves as among the most respectable and well-regulated offshore centres, many senior figures fear little care will be taken to protect their interests.

Ozouf puts a brave face on it. “It’s a never-ending, moving task. We’re a jurisdiction that accepts the inevitable conveyor belt of change. Jersey has succeeded because it’s moved with whatever the market demands are.”

Phil Smith joins BDC Financial Services

05.05.13

Phil Smith joins BDC Financial Services.

Experience is the key word that comes to mind when describing Phil Smith. Phil hails from the UK where he built his accountancy practice over a 30 year period. In 2012, Phil saw the light, sold his business and, together with his wife, emigrated to New Zealand to be closer to their adult son and granddaughter. Phil brings diplomacy and extensive experience in the practice of accountancy. He enjoys getting to know his customers well and working with them to find solutions that work best for them. He has a love of natural history (David Attenborough is a favourite) and tramping (although he still thinks of it as hiking).