Deadweight costs and ACC

This week's Initiative column at Interest.co.nz takes on deadweight costs and ACC. A snippet:

Andrew Little is right to be worried about the deadweight costs of this tax. The extra 0.33 percent that workers and firms pay in ACC levies would be better left in employer and employee pockets.



The Infometrics analysis uses standard Treasury methods where raising a dollar in tax is assumed to cost the country $0.20 over and above the value of the raised dollar: $0.20 in ‘deadweight’ costs, as economists put it. These are not primarily the administrative costs of collecting taxes but rather the costs the economy faces when a payroll tax makes employees more expensive for employers and makes employment less rewarding for employees.

An extra 0.33% in payroll tax will not be a make-or-break issue for most employees or employers, but would be enough to kill just under 600 jobs in a country with just under 2.4 million employed persons. As Little warns, excess taxation by ACC “costs jobs and growth and holds New Zealand back.”

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But while we are considering changes to ACC to avoid the 0.33 percent excess tax, we could perhaps consider more ambitious changes. In particular, does New Zealand really need strongly prescriptive workplace safety rules if ACC premiums are set correctly? ACC offers reasonable discounts and penalty rates based on firms’ claims histories, with additional discounts for complying with best practice standards in safety.

The New Zealand Initiative’s Dr Bryce Wilkinson provided back-of-the-envelope indicative calculations thatthe additional costs of more stringent scaffolding regulations alone could be of the order of $180 million. If ACC has its levies set correctly, construction companies (and others) would already have strong incentive to provide a safe work environment, and could tailor their safety practices to reduce accidents by whatever method is most cost-effective in their particular situations rather than having to comply with standards that might not always be fit for purpose.

If Little could ensure that ACC gets its pricing right, and uses that mechanism to help ensure worker safety rather than prescriptive standards, the benefits to the economy could be much greater than the savings from reducing the average ACC levy from 2.16 percent to 1.83 percent.