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The Dominion Post
December 27, 2003
ACC fraud scheme a no-show
by Nikki MacDonald
An ACC data matching scheme billed last year as a
multimillion- dollar fraud saver has not gone ahead.
ACC fraud manager Robert Liberona said in January 2002 that ACC was
collaborating with the taxation department to match data held by the two
agencies in a bid to catch people "double dipping". ACC claimants'
records were to be matched with the Inland Revenue Department's to check if
claimants were declaring all their income to ACC.
The scheme was supposed to be running by June 2002 and was expected to save
the country about $100 million a year in ACC fraud.
But 18 months later ACC conceded that no data matching was taking place
between the two agencies. No explanation was given.
Inland Revenue said it was in ongoing discussions with ACC and had no comment
to make on any specific issue. An ACC spokesman said the agency did match
data with the Corrections Department to identify claimants who had been
jailed and no longer qualified for compensation.
This had identified 51 debt cases in the past 12 months.
The Dominion Post revealed last month that ACC spent almost $4.5 million on
private investigators in the past three years, to detect fraud worth less
than half that amount. A spokesman said the investigations had prevented
further losses that could have amounted to almost $39 million.
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