POSTSCRIPT: In May 2017 the Tax Gap series was honoured at the Canon Media Awards as the country's best piece of investigative journalism. Judges said the series was "the epitome of public service journalism: probing a complex subject of vital interest to all New Zealanders and shining a revealing spotlight on what powerful multinationals would have preferred to keep hidden".
Tax fairness has been an issue adopted by the Herald in a bid to drive public debate about an issue of fundamental importance to the economy and government finances.
Today's report on the tax arrangements of technology giant Apple - which has paid no income tax to Inland Revenue over the past decade while also extracting $4.2 billion from Kiwi consumers - is the latest in a long series of stories.
The 'Tax Gap' series started last year with a data-driven project assessing the size of the problem, exploring both the 20 companies most aggressive in shifting profits out of New Zealand - with collective revenues of $10b annually they paid only $1.8m in income taxes - a longer feature on transfer pricing and a visualisation showing how globally profitably companies barely broke even in New Zealand.
The companies named in this first instalment were given an opportunity to explain their tax arrangements and why their reported profit margins - and hence tax payments - were so much lower in New Zealand than elsewhere.