Wealth in land and property

People in the property and land-heavy industries dominate the group of uberwealthy New Zealanders at the heart of the Government’s research into tax paid by the wealthy.

Information released to the Herald under the Official Information Act showed the methodology used by IRD to draw up the sample of the top 0.1 per cent of wealthiest New Zealanders that will be used for its research.

IRD then divided the members of this sample into the primary, secondary, tertiary (non-property) and tertiary (property) sectors.

It then compared these numbers with the size of those sectors in terms of employment and their contribution to GDP. This was to show whether high wealth individuals were concentrated into particular sectors, and to question whether IRD’S sample was accurate.

“. . . property and land-based industries are highly represented in the data”, IRD said.

The paper said these industries were represented “at higher rates than both the employment share and GDP share of these industries in the general economy”.

About a quarter of high wealth individuals came from the property services sector, despite it employing less than 5 per cent of New Zealand’s total employees. Likewise, the share of high wealth individuals in the primary sector is double its share of the labour force.

The paper said there were “clear reasons” for the dominance of property, “given that there are certain activities (investment, property ownership) that would be expected to have greater involvement by those who accumulate significant wealth”.

The IRD drew up the sample using “environmental scanning”, which involved “monitoring large transactions or other indications that individuals had significant wealth holdings, using both public information, and . . . tax data”.

That list was then refined to remove non-tax residents and deceased people. The paper was drawn up to make sure the sample of 0.1 per centers was representative and to correct for possible biases.

IRD said the fact that those sectors were overrepresented in its sample meant there was little risk they would be under-represented when it came to data collected.

The paper was dated last November and its findings may have changed. It is part of a series of documents on a research project into the tax paid by very wealthy individuals, which was commissioned by Revenue Minister David Parker. The Government said the research was not being used to design new taxes, but said it could inform future policy.