ACC

There are always people having a lend of ACC. This one got caught. No doubt some Labour politician will take up his case.

A Hutt Valley man who was filmed walking around a supermarket while claiming he needed a wheelchair has lost a battle to get his ACC payments back.

Wiremu Brightwell had appealed against a 2010 ACC decision, stripping him of his disability allowance.

But in Wellington District Court Judge David Ongley found he “probably wilfully exaggerated his symptoms and presented a severe disability that was not caused by his covered personal injury”.  Read more »

Killer Cows are costing ACC big time, even more than shark injuries. Blair Ensor writes:

From the inane to the insane – rats, cats, sharks and even monkeys have contributed to a multi-million dollar insurance bill by inflicting pain on their human counterparts.  Read more »

Sue Moron-ey manages to put the moron back into the Labour party and makes herself look the April Fool at the same time.

She has issued a press release damning the “hike” in ACC levies.

New Zealanders will pay millions of dollars more to ACC from tomorrow thanks to the Government’s revenue gathering levy hike says Labour’s ACC spokesperson Sue Moroney.

“The Government is making April fools of New Zealanders by keeping their ACC levies artificially high.

“Both ACC and The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MoBIE) recommended lowering the levies from April 1, but ACC Minister Judith Collins ignored their advice. It is estimated her decision will cost employers and workers $600 million.  Read more »

John Roughan has written about the Pullar/Boag manufactured ACC privacy scandal and comes to the same conclusion I did months ago…in fact I think he must have read my post and just cut/pasted it.

By the time they presented the Privacy Commissioner with their report, the country was sick of the subject and hardly anybody read it.

It ran to 102 pages. You had to read to page 99 to discover exactly what sort of confidential client information had escaped.

But finally, in the fifth appendix, there it was: a sample of the fabled spreadsheet of “personal” data. It consisted of four tables listing claimants’ names (removed for the report), their claim numbers, review numbers, branch, lodgement dates, issue codes, decision dates and the like.

That was it. That is all there was.

There was nothing that could be of the slightest use or interest to anyone outside ACC. No personal details alongside the names, no injury information, nothing.

That is what all the fuss had been about.

The media and Pullar/Boag have a lot to answer for.

The thing that disappointed me was that so many people had known all along that the “massive privacy breach” amounted to nothing more than this. Investigative reporters, the Privacy Commissioner, her Independent Review Team, all would have discovered the contents of the spreadsheet very quickly.

None blew the whistle. No reports that I saw looked critically at the facts at the heart of a story that kept on growing and giving. The Privacy Commissioner did not say something to restore a sense of proportion. The review team, no doubt well paid, went about its investigation as though there was a serious problem.

An accident had happened. An ACC rehabilitation officer had a monthly sheet of case reviews on his screen when he decided to respond to an email. He dragged the data aside, clicked a wrong button and unwittingly attached it to the return email.

Computers are a minefield for privacy. Accidents will happen, despite all the procedures the commissioner’s expert team has laid down. It happened to Social Welfare kiosks a short time later.

If the data is as indecipherable as that ACC released, it won’t matter in the slightest. It was the trivial story of the year.

That is was…but it cost Nick Smith his job because of a silly cow who flips it up for pollies in order to get what she wants…who was aided and abetted by a bully. The problem was for them is they picked on the wrong minister…and she set up crushing the leaky board on the way through. Having compromised himself he is now having to get his mates to do backflips in order to rehabilitate himself.

Someone should ask Pullar how much she has received…for all her standover I’ll bet good money that she got nothing and still has got nothing.

What happened to all the bluster from Little and Mallard?

Trevor Mallard and Andrew Little are bullies, and when bullies are confronted they fold….especially when all they had was an anonymous email.

ACC Minister Judith Collins’ defamation action against Labour MPs Trevor Mallard and Andrew Little has been settled following a hearing in the High Court at Auckland today.

Ms Collins initiated the defamation case against the pair after comments they made on Radio New Zealand linking her to the leak of an email from former National Party President Michelle Boag.

The email identified Bronwyn Pullar as the woman at the centre of a massive privacy breach at ACC.

In a statement today following their meeting, the three parliamentarians said they agreed “the leak of the email Ms Boag sent to the minister and forwarded on her instructions as the responsible minister to the chairman and chief executive of ACC raised an issue of serious public concern, and that Messrs Mallard and Little were entitled to question who was responsible for that leak”.

“The parties continue to differ over whether the comments made by Messrs Mallard and Little respectively on Radio NZ implied the minister falsely assured the House that neither she nor her office was responsible for the leak.

“Messrs Mallard and Little have confirmed to Ms Collins that was not their intention and wish to make that clear publicly that in the event such meaning was taken they regret it.”

Andrew Little is wanting to commit the Labour party and New Zealand to massive bills for ACC as they seek to make it the largest welfare department known to man.

Labour ACC spokesman Andrew Little is urging his party to remove an “injustice” in the no-fault scheme by extending it to cover incapacity caused by illness or disease as well as accident.

He is also calling for it to dump the fully-funded model, which sets levies to cover the future cost of current injuries.

In a speech to a conference looking back on the 1972-75 Kirk Labour Government, Little said it was time to consider what to do about the inconsistent treatment of those incapacitated as a result of an accident and those incapacitated as a result of disease or illness.

”It’s more than an inconsistency. It’s an injustice.”

He said the debate in the late 1960s was closely linked to the question of social security and the responsibility of the community to ensure everyone was provided for.

”That would be a different debate today … not just because the size and shape of our social security system is of a magnitude unlikely to have been contemplated at that time, but because we also have a popular discourse that increasingly demeans and devalues those who, because of life’s misfortunes, find themselves dependant on a welfare payment.”

But the injustice should not be overlooked just because it was difficult or inconvenient.

That would be a huge multi-billion dollar annual commitment…now we know why they need the Greens policy of printing billions of extra money.

I see that there has been a privacy complaint from the leaking of the story of the eel bum man.

Speaking of slippery characters, I am wondering now if Michelle Boag is in contact with her bestie Mel Reid from 60 Minutes to have an exclusive with the eel who has quite horribly had its privacy breached.

Hospital bosses have launched an investigation into a breach of patient privacy after details of an eel getting stuck up a man’s bottom were made public.

The Auckland District Health Board said this afternoon that it would investigate “the apparent inappropriate access of clinical records and the possible separate leaking of information to the media”.

Must be worth a few hundie even though we still do not know of the eel’s name.

Oh dear, it looks as though IRD is following ACC’s lead.  I wonder which National Party activist the IRD has sent them to?

Inland Revenue has apologised after personal details for just under 30 customers were incorrectly released.

Deputy Commissioner Service Delivery Arlene White said a preliminary internal investigation indicated last week’s incident may have been caused by a manual handling error.

The part I am most concerned about is that they haven’t got the information back.  May be the recipient is negotiating a deal?

“We have contacted the recipient of this information and our highest priority is the return of the information,” Ms White said.

“We are also contacting the customers whose information has been released to apologise and letting them know the steps we are taking to remedy the situation.”

So, do the initial ‘steps’ to the ‘remedy the situation’ look something like this:

1. Ask for the information back

2. Ask again for the information to be returned

3. Have meetings to have the information returned.

4. Strike a deal to get the information returned – lower tax rate perhaps?

5. Ask the recipient really nicely to stay away from Phil Kitchin.

I will now turn briefly to the Auditor General’s ramblings.  Which did not cover the privacy issues. I use the term ramblings as this report is about as nonsensical as the 100 page KPMG report in buzz words and drama.  It does though report on Bronwyn Pullar’s nagging to death of Board Member John McCliskie in September 2011.

Hear the poor man’s pain getting an ear bashing as you read the report.

McCliskie does not remember much about Pullar such as being on the verge of employing her in a contract role.  He even tries to fob her off to a claims person.

Pullar, just as she was with Nick Smith was having none of it. I respect you, I would like to meet you, ignoring that she doesn’t respect his position at all.  Just like Nick Smith’s or she never would have asked.

McCliskie then fobbed Pullar off on to John Judge who disapproved of meeting Pullar in the first place.

Pullar didn’t let them get off without yet another ear-bashing, sending an email to McCliskie advising ACC that they could obviously could do with her advice, you know, despite being unfit to work full-time and having had a payout from one insurance policy for what, almost a decade?

Really? A total piece of work.

Also this report brings out that Pullar tried to get Nick Smith to intervene in her case with action.

Despite Andrew Little’s poisonous assertions the Auditor General found NO influence that Pullar was after from the Board was actually applied in her favour.

So despite Pullar’s name-dropping, exercising her mouth and muscle and using the National Party extensively the Auditor General’s report has actually CLEARED the Board and the Nick Smith of influencing her claim.

Andrew Little’s year will only get worse from here.