Goods and services tax (GST) returns

Goods and services tax (GST) returns are collected by Inland Revenue on a monthly, bi-monthly, or six-monthly basis depending on the size of the firm. The GST data collected have very broad coverage and non-compliance is low, so are often treated as full coverage. Some business activities (primarily in the financial services and real estate industries) are exempt from GST, while other activities (mainly exports but also sales of a business or part of a business) are zero-rated, as discussed in The Rough Guide to the LBD. IR provides more detail on exempt and zero-rated activities here. Zero-rated supplies are separately identified in GST returns, while exempt supplies are excluded from returns.

Prior to 2017, Stats NZ provided an annual aggregated GST measure at the enterprise level, based on the rules used in their Business Activity Indicator (BAI) series. When Stats NZ stopped producing the BAI they instead shifted to providing the underlying data from GST returns directly through a load table (load_gst_return) in the LBD. A cleaned monthly version of this data at the PENT level is also available as part of the Fabling and Mare (2015, 2019) suite of productivity tables - see Measuring Productivity.

It is useful to read the guide given to those filling out the GST return:

And as usual, it is useful to see the form itself:

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