This study was undertaken to get a deeper understanding of the business community’ views. We explored how the business community’s attitudes differ depending on whether IR shares information with government or non-government organisations. We also explored how the type of information being shared and the aim of the information sharing affect these opinions.
Purpose
The study was designed to explore:
- Level of comfort and support for Inland Revenue business data sharing with a range of government and non-government organisations.
- What types of information does business consider acceptable to share.
- Which government and non-government organisations/ general public is business comfortable sharing with.
- Impact of wider data sharing on the integrity of the New Zealand tax system.
Methodology
Questionnaire design
The research design included a prior round of eight stakeholder interviews that included internal Inland Revenue staff, other interested government staff and external business community representatives. The findings from these interviews were then reported on in an internal Inland Revenue workshop where key areas for the telephone questionnaire were explored and developed.
The resultant draft questionnaire underwent a round of cognitive testing (n=5) and also refinement with input from the Inland Revenue research team.
The questionnaire included four hypothetical information-sharing scenarios designed to test a range of options for business data sharing that highlighted potential business benefits, types of information to be shared and differentiated with who this business information would be shared. Due to the complexity and length of the questionnaire half of the sample were asked scenarios one and two and the other half of the sample were asked scenarios three and four.
Key audiences
The survey was designed to gather the opinions of a range of business owners and managers about the sharing and other new uses of information collected.
In order to have views from all business types the sampling regime was designed in such a way so that each business type sub-group had at least 100 respondents. However, due to time constraints and telephone sample issues, only 80 surveys were completed for Significant Enterprises.
The table below shows the number of surveys achieved for each sub-group as well as the true population. The total survey sample (n=480) represented 0.04% of the total number of businesses (n=1,261,500) in the true population count.