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22 Austl. Tax F. 59 (2007)
Complexity of New Zealand's Tax Laws: An Empirical Study

handle is hein.journals/austraxrum22 and id is 57 raw text is: Complexity of New Zealand's tax laws: An empirical study Caroline Pau, Adrian Sawyer and Andrew Maples* Abstract New Zealand's (NZ's) income tax legislation has been identified as unnecessarily complex and detailed. In response to this concern, the income tax legislation was reorganised and is undergoing a complete rewrite.The recent enactment of the Income Tax Act 2004 (ITA 2004), which includes the rewritten Parts C to E, completes phase three of the rewrite process. Consistent with previous studies, this analysis uses four readability measures - Flesch Reading Ease Score, Flesch-Kincoid Grade Level (F-KGL) Index, average sentence length, and percentage of passive sentences - to examine the readability of New Zealand's ITA 2004 and other tax related materials, such as Tax Information Bulletins (TIBs) and binding rulings. Although the rewrite process is not fully complete, the results from this study show that the readability of the ITA 2004 has improved significantly as indicated by the Flesch Reading Ease Score and average sentence length. * Caroline Pau is a B Corn (Hons) graduate, Adrian Sawvyer an Associate Professor of Taxation and Andrew Maples a Senior Lecturer in Taxation, all froin the Department of Accountancy, Finance & Information Systems, Universitv of Canterbury, Christchurch NZ. The corresponding author is Adrian Sawyer (adrian.sawyeracanterbury.ac.nz). This is based on an earlier version of a project completed by Ms Pau as part of her B Con (Hons) program. We wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for their valuable conrnients on an earlier version of this article. This article was accepted for publication 2 March 2007. 59

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