This Bill repeals the Business Payment Practices Act 2023 (the Act) and revokes its secondary legislation. The Act was put in place to address long business-to-business payment times by requiring large entities to disclose their payment practices on a public register. However, the Government’s view is that most small businesses will not have time to search for payment data on the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment’s Internet site and that, even if they can find it and interpret it correctly, it would be unlikely to impact their decisions about who to do business with. Furthermore, information on late payers is already available from credit agencies. The repeal of the Act will remove compliance costs that would have applied to large entities. Comparable overseas disclosure regimes show that even if the reporting process is automated, there are still cases where manual intervention is required. This creates an ongoing obligation to manually collate and enter invoice receipt dates.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment is required to prepare a disclosure statement to assist with the scrutiny of this Bill. The disclosure statement provides access to information about the policy development of the Bill and identifies any significant or unusual legislative features of the Bill.

A copy of the statement can be found at http://legislation.govt.nz/disclosure.aspx?type=bill&subtype=government&year=2024&no=28.