Business Register Identification

The Māori business flag is known inside the Business Register team as the Māori Business Indicator or MBI. Updates to this flag, in the Business Register, occur automatically from Inland Revenue taxation status criteria, and manually otherwise.

How Statistics NZ’s Business Register enables identification

The Business Register is a database of the individual economic units that make up New Zealand’s economy. It includes private businesses – from self-employed individuals, farms, and small stores, to large corporations. It also includes organisations such as clubs and societies, government departments, local authorities, churches, and voluntary groups.

The maintained population for the Business Register is ‘economically significant enterprises’. An enterprise is said to be economically significant if it meets one or more of the following criteria:

• annual expenses or sales (subject to GST) of more than $30,000

• 12-month rolling mean employee count of greater than three

• part of a group of enterprises

• registered for GST and involved in agriculture or forestry

• over $40,000 of income recorded in the IR10 annual tax return.

These criteria also involve using the rolling average of an enterprise’s returns as at the lower border some enterprises would “dolphin” in and out of eligibility.

The Business Register is the basis for all Statistics NZ business surveys. It provides the survey population from which we choose business survey samples.

Limitations of the tax-code approach

Voluntary identification

Relying on tax codes to identify Māori authorities has shortcomings. Although a Māori authority is eligible to use the Māori authority (MA) or Māori trust (MT) tax codes, they may choose not to. This creates problems in automatically identifying Māori authorities in the Business Register.

To address this, we used existing lists from the Business Register to help identify businesses. However, we can increase the number of businesses we collect information on if we use lists of Māori authorities and their support businesses directly from our partners such as the Poutama Trust and NZ Māori Tourism.