Abstract
This paper was written while the authors were on secondment to Statistics New Zealand and was funded by the Department of Labour. We thank the editor and referee, as well as Sylvia Dixon, Sid Durbin, Andrew McLeod, Simon McLoughlin, Dirk Van Seventer, and seminar participants at the Australian FairPay Commission Research Forum and the Labour Employment and Work Workshop for helpful comments and discussions. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed are those of the authors, and do not purport to represent those of Statistics New Zealand or the Department of Labour, who take no responsibility for any omissions or errors in the information contained here. Access to the data was provided by Statistics New Zealand under conditions designed to give effect to the security and confidentiality provisions of the Statistics Act 1975. Only people authorized by the Statistics Act 1975 are allowed to see data about a particular person or firm. The tables in this paper contain information about groups of people so that the confidentiality of individuals is protected. The results are based in part on tax data supplied by Inland Revenue to Statistics New Zealand under the Tax Administration Act 1994. These tax data must be used only for statistical purposes, and no individual information is published or disclosed in any other form, or provided back to Inland Revenue for administrative or regulatory purposes. Any discussion of data limitations or weaknesses is in the context of using the Statistics New Zealand's Linked Employer–Employee Database (LEED) for statistical purposes, and is not related to the ability of the data to support Inland Revenue's core operational requirements. Careful consideration has been given to the privacy, security, and confidentiality issues associated with using tax data in this project. A full discussion can be found in the LEED Project Privacy Impact Assessment paper (Statistics New Zealand, 2003).