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Otago Daily Times
January 16, 2002
Following the money
Editorial
New legislation allowing lump sum payments to
sexual abuse victims could be vulnerable to fraudulent claims
By 1993, when the then National government axed
lump sum compensation claims, some 13,000 sexual abuse claimants had
succeeded in getting $10,000 each. Five years earlier, at the end of the
first year of the system, some 221 claims had been met. It is assumed that in
that short period of time, the law of unintended consequences had been fully
realised.
No reasonable person would deny that in a socially
caring society, where the state has officially taken the role of soother of
life's wounds and bottomless charity to the community's supplicants, genuine
sexual abuse victims are deserving of legal redress and assistance to help
get their lives back into some kind of order. That was the original purpose
of the Lange Labour government's compensation scheme. It might fairly be
argued, too, that victims or witnesses of other crimes might be judged
entitled to similar compensation but, alas, their lobbying might has not been
a patch on that of the feminist movement's.
National decided in 1993 that the gravy train the
lump sum scheme had become was getting too crowded with opportunist
applicants encouraged by numerous flaky trauma theorists. Sexual abuse
claimants thereafter were entitled to funding for counselling through the ACC
- resulting in no fewer than 900 counsellors being registered with the organisation;
they now see some 4000 new clients every year. Also available were physical
and vocational rehabilitation, child-care and travel costs, weekly
compensation payments, and an independence allowance.
The present Government, no less sentimental or more
sensible than David Lange's crew, last year passed the Injury Prevention
Rehabilitation and Compensation 2001 Act which, from April 1, reintroduces
lump-sum payments for injury victims, including sexual abuse claimants. We
say "claimants" rather than "proven victims" because in
this particular instance, the usual rule of the law is to be abandoned from
April 1. No complaint needs first to be made to the police, no formal record
or proof of any allegation needs to be provided, no abuser need be named, no
court conviction of an alleged offender need exist, and the only person in
authority who has to be satisfied that abuse has occurred and mental or
injury trauma has resulted before a payment may be authorised is an ACC
counsellor.
The new Act does not, however, allow lump-sum
payments for retrospective claims; only for those that occur after April 1.
The date is the marker for compensation, not when the claim is lodged.
Historical claims, however, may still qualify for the previous allowances. It
cannot have been much of a surprise to any Government politician that with
such potentially easy pickings in sight, an entrepreneurial legal firm has
been busy seeking claimants. It must have cost a lot to print and send out
more than a million leaflets encouraging "sexual abuse victims" to
hire the firm to investigate and advise on possible entitlements and claims,
for a fee of 25 percent plus GST (including backdating) and the first full
quarterly payment for a successful lump-sum claim. It is reasonable to assume
that the law firm had done its sums.
So, too, appears to be the case with ACC. The
corporation has been busy, in conjunction with Rape Crisis, sending every
health clinic in the country 0800-number cards to hand out to patients so
they can telephone to make a compensation claim. Although the Government has
allowed $60 million for the total annual cost of all lump sum payments in the
first year of the revised scheme, history suggests a budget blowout is
inevitable over time. After all, by 1993, payments for sexual abuse lump sum
claims alone had reached $130 million.
On the face of it, the revised Act looks likely to
highlight the corporation's vulnerability to fraudulent claims, for there
appear to be no safeguards, other than the skills of ACC counsellors, to
prevent them. The change in the law seems a counter-productive way to go
about effecting rehabilitation; hard-pressed taxpayers might justifiably
consider the standards of proof required of claimants to also be grievously
deficient.
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