(1).jpg)
The Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) is under fire for having a “disturbing” information gap in relation to its official reporting on how many claims it approves or declines.
In a report by Stuff, Barrister Warren Forster, who represents ACC claimants, claims the corporation has left out tens of thousands of blank template letters from its report. Forster explained that in his experience the “CM03” documents were like blank cheque letters, which he noted are often used by ACC staff to decline claims.
ACC, meanwhile, reportedly said that only a small number of “blank cheque” letters are used to decline claims, but it cannot confirm the total number as it “would require ACC to undertake an extensive manual search through all claim files.”
“We have undertaken a high level search and are confident that only a small portion of the CM03 letters relate to decline decisions,” an ACC spokesperson told the publication. “Since ACC revised and reduced the number of letter templates in its system, the overall number of CM03 letters generated has also reduced.”
Additionally, ACC reportedly said that it provided the Minister for ACC with claims data but not information on CM03 letters.
Without counting all of the CM03 letters, Forster suggested ACC’s figures would be “wildly inaccurate.”
The publication mentioned advice from ACC, which suggested the annual number of claims it had declined or ruled against was 99,500 – far from the 300,000 claims turned down by ACC that was highlighted in a report authored by Forster in 2015.
“If they are telling the minister they are only declining 99,500 claims a year then what they are doing is lying to the minister and they need to stop doing that,” he said.
He deemed the information gap to be disturbing because that data was used for statistical modelling by the organisation, which was in turn used to set performance measurements.
