Do Lawyers make a Distinctive Contribution to Tax Policy-making?: Reflections on the Contributions of Lawyers to Tax Policy-making in New Zealand
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Lawyers play an important part in tax policy making in New Zealand (NZ). This paper briefly reviews NZ’s Generic Tax Policy Process (GTPP), and then turns it focus on the important contributions legal practitioners and academics can make to tax policy development. Data has been gathered concerning the contributions of NZ lawyers who are, or have been, tax policymakers, law makers, submitters and commentators. This paper also notes the limited instances where legal and other theoretical approaches to tax policy have been incorporated into tax policy making design in NZ, including novel tax policy design, such as the concept of the Broad Base Low Rate (BBLR) structure. It concludes that lawyers have made a valuable, but not necessarily distinctive, contribution to tax policy development in NZ.