25 Jul 2005

A new $2.84 million, four-year package aimed at reducing compliance costs and improving access to business information was recently announced by Statistics Minister Pete Hodgson and Minister for Small Business Rick Barker. Read More

THE PACKAGE

$1.09 million to reduce compliance costs. This money will be spent on a technology upgrade designed to make it easier to contribute to surveys and to provide respondents with current information on the surveys they are selected in. This initiative is goes towards meeting commitments made under the Government's Business Compliance Cost Panel.

$1.599 million for benchmarking. This money will be spent on working with users to assess their needs for bench-marking tools. Statistics New Zealand will then develop an official statistics series that will be available to businesses via the internet. The objective is to help small and medium sized enterprises in particular benchmark their performance so that they may identify ways in which they can improve their productivity.

Being able to benchmark your performance against industry norms is a valuable business planning asset for many small and medium sized enterprises.

The service will be developed in consultation with Business New Zealand, the Small Business Advisory Group, the Icehouse Business Incubator, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, BizInfo and the New Zealand Hotel Council.

$156,000 for XBRL Pilot. Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a computer language that enables information exchange between computer systems. The money will be used to run a pilot project to employ it for the exchange of information between businesses and Statistics New Zealand.