Not Quite Right

The census forms are only just going out and already people are alleging that it's just one big trap.
One of usenet's resident loons says that they ought to be renamed to "Inland Rvenue entrapment forms", insisting that there's no way that Statistics New Zealand could possibly need the financial information it's after and thus the forms are really desinted for the tax and child support enforcement teams within the IRD.

Ignoring the legal problem with such a theory - the Statistics Act 1975 makes it an offence to even show individual returns to anyone who's not a duly-authorised Stats NZ employee - there's the small detail of collating all the information for such enforcement. It's a data-matching scheme on the grandest scale conceivable (and even then it's only conceivable in a seriously deluded mind), and one that would entail scanning literally millions of forms into a database along with a cross-match of where each form came from. Trying to keep a project of that type secret would be impossible, since there would necessarily be a large number of employees involved in the development, administration and operation of it. Only one person needs to squeal to blow the whole thing wide open.