Government ministers today unveiled a new $2.84 million, four-year package aimed at reducing compliance costs and improving access to business information.

Just over $1 million is to go on new technology and software designed to reduce compliance costs for those businesses that supply data to Statistics New Zealand.

Statistics New Zealand will also spend $1.6 million on the introduction of a new web-based service to provide information against which businesses can benchmark their performance. 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. The package was announced by Statistics Minister Pete Hodgson and Minister for Small Business Rick Barker.

The balance will go on a pilot programme to standardise data collection.

"Kiwi businesses contribute a great deal to Statistics New Zealand and it’s good to see services for business being further improved," Pete Hodgson said.

"Being able to benchmark your performance against industry norms is a valuable business planning asset for many small and medium sized enterprises. This new web-based service should make that easier for business,” Rick Barker said.

Statistics New Zealand is also planning to extend the amount of social, economic and trade information it makes available free of charge.

Today’s announcement follows Friday’s launch of a new Ministry of Economic Development website www.businessconsultation.govt.nz designed to make government consultation with businesses a smoother, and more efficient process.

Additional notes attached

$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.

$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.