Dunedin financial planner Craig Myles is calling for more information to be made available on the numbers of New Zealanders joining KiwiSaver.
Finance Minister Michael Cullen and Revenue Minister Peter Dunne yesterday released a statement saying the number of New Zealanders joining the retirement scheme had reached 414,144 at the end of January.
Treasury had forecast 276,000 people would have joined by July 1, 2008. Mr Myles, a director of Myles Wealth Management, said Inland Revenue should have provided more meaningful statistics about those joining.
He wanted to know how many of the new savers were seasonal workers who would not be working full-time past the start of the university year.
Those KiwiSaver members were likely to use the opt-out provision of the legislation. Anyone starting a new job was automatically enrolled in the scheme.
Also, some people were likely to still be signing up to gain the $1000 from the Government and doing no other saving, he said.
‘‘It's difficult to assess whether the scheme is doing what it set out to do unless we get better detail. ‘‘It's cute to wave the success of the scheme around just by releasing the joining numbers,'' Mr Myles said.
Mr Dunne said one of the most positive aspects of the latest data on registrations was the popularity of the scheme among younger people.
The registration level among young adults indicated that KiwiSaver was acting to encourage a greater level of personal savings in New Zealand than would have been experienced had the scheme not been introduced.
At the end of January, about 55.7% of KiwiSavers were under 45 and 22% were younger than 25.
Mr Myles said the positive aspect was that people investing now for the long term were buying cheap and good quality assets because world markets had fallen.
