On Monday, the government rolled out another discussion document forming part of the project on making tax simpler. This latest discussion document focuses on improving social policy payments.

This discussion document proposes that social policy payments should be based off more real-time data compared with the old system with the idea being that payments should be correct at the time of payment rather than waiting for end of year wash-ups and calculations.

This will be leveraged off the other initiatives such as near real time investment information being provided to IRD as part of the investment income changes currently in Bill form.

The way social policy payments work and the adjustments required are not often well understood and getting the money to where it needs to be at the correct time without long delays or the unfortunate requirement to return an over-payment would be an improvement. However, finding a simple way to do this without fundamentally changing some of these adjustments could be tricky.

Submissions on the proposal are open until 15 September 2017.