New Zealand – Submission to UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women

This background memorandum outlines how New Zealand’s domestic entity and tax laws, combined with extremely low or zero tax rates for selected items, particularly for trusts and for multinational corporations that can take advantage of profit shifting accounting practices, jeopardize women’s human and gender equality rights in New Zealand (i) at the domestic level, particularly with respect to women and Indigenous communities, (ii) as an ‘upstream’ country from which untaxed profits and productive assets are funnelled through and to countries that tax accumulated after tax incomes very lightly, and (iii) as a source of lightly or untaxed incomes channelled from ‘downstream’ countries to other low or zero tax rate jurisdictions.