author-avatar author-avatar author-avatar author-avatar

Kathleen Lahey, Andres Knobel, Moran Harari, Liz Nelson ■ New Zealand – Submission to UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women

DOWNLOAD REPORT
Tax justice reports
Tax justice reports

New Zealand – Submission to UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women

This submission to CEDAW’s 70th session, held in Geneva from 2 – 20 July 2018, summarises how New Zealand's tax system jeopardizes women’s human and gender equality rights in New Zealand and abroad.

This background memorandum outlines how New Zealand’s domestic entity and tax laws, combined with extremely low or zero tax rates for selected items, particularly for trusts and for multinational corporations that can take advantage of profit shifting accounting practices, jeopardize women’s human and gender equality rights in New Zealand (i) at the domestic level, particularly with respect to women and Indigenous communities, (ii) as an ‘upstream’ country from which untaxed profits and productive assets are funnelled through and to countries that tax accumulated after tax incomes very lightly, and (iii) as a source of lightly or untaxed incomes channelled from ‘downstream’ countries to other low or zero tax rate jurisdictions.