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Tony Morris: Inland Revenue spokesperson on the horticulture sector not paying enough tax · Best of Business

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  Speaker 2: Now.
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  Speaker 3: The IID has caught the horticulture industry underpaying taxes to
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  Speaker 3: the tune of forty five million dollars. Tony Morris is
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  Speaker 3: a spokesperson for IID with us now, Hey, Tony the
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  Speaker 3: head very well, thank you. Is it more than you
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  Speaker 3: were expecting.
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  Speaker 2: A little bit more for the tenants so far? But
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  Speaker 2: it is an industry where there's a risk of tax
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  Speaker 2: not being paid well, either intentionally or not intentionally.
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  Speaker 3: Why is it a risk for this industry, Well.
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  Speaker 2: It's an industry where there's plenty of cash. There's sort
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  Speaker 2: of a transient workforce, so the growers need to employ
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  Speaker 2: lots of different people, not for a whole year, at
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  Speaker 2: different times. So what we see in the industry is
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  Speaker 2: the growers who need people to pick for them, they
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  Speaker 2: tend to employ a contracting firm who employ all the pickers,
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  Speaker 2: and the contracting firm that times can actually also contract
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  Speaker 2: to another contracting firm to contract to the Because it's
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  Speaker 2: quite a complex industry and if there's payments going through
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  Speaker 2: with cash or what else, it's easy to sort of
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  Speaker 2: get lost or things that happen intentionally. It's hard to
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  Speaker 2: attract the money and not all the taxes paid correctly.
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  Speaker 3: So how did you crack down on this? Is this
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  Speaker 3: basically because you've got that extra funding for enforcement.
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  Speaker 2: S acenario that we've been looking at for a few years.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, working cross government to try and come up
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  Speaker 2: with some solutions, but certainly the excellent using some of
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  Speaker 2: the extra money as well to increase what we're doing
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  Speaker 2: over the next year or so. So a bit both really,
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  Speaker 2: but certainly something that's something that we need to keep
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  Speaker 2: working on.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, how do you put the cibosh on this?
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  Speaker 2: It's one of those tricky problems. Certainly we're doing audits
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  Speaker 2: where we need to and investigations, but the more we
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  Speaker 2: can do to actually try and get the paid TAXT
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  Speaker 2: early is the best results. So what we've seen over
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  Speaker 2: ours years, we're trying to actually work with the growers
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  Speaker 2: who you know who generally are doing the right thing,
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  Speaker 2: and I want to make the industry safe and working
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  Speaker 2: with the industry to put more on them to make
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  Speaker 2: sure that they can either withhold texts from the contracting
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  Speaker 2: firms or make sure the contracting firms are viable and
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  Speaker 2: compliant and similar with the contracting firms around when they're
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  Speaker 2: paying the pickers, they're deducting texts early, so we're not
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  Speaker 2: leaving the text to come from the pickers at the
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  Speaker 2: end of the day, but trying to get the text
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  Speaker 2: early on as the money's been passed across a joint problem.
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  Speaker 2: But it's one of those ones that we can educate
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  Speaker 2: people get the text early in the transactions. That's the
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  Speaker 2: best way for us to go.
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  Speaker 3: Good stuff, Tony, best of luck with it. I really
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  Speaker 3: appreciate your time, Tony Morris and Land Revenue Department.
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