Aligning policies and practice
We’ve made revisions to our operational policies and legislation over the last two years since becoming aware in 2015 that our practice didn’t always align with the law.
Examples include a mistake with the Accommodation Supplement and another where we found some people may be better off on Temporary Additional Support rather than the Special Benefit.
As we made public at the time, in some cases we underpaid people. This shouldn’t have happened and we’ve repaid the money we owe in many cases. We’re still working through identifying other people we need to repay as we don’t know where they now live.
We help clients with a huge number of transactions all around New Zealand every day. Nearly all of these go smoothly.
We’ve made a number of improvements to both our policies and our legislation since then and we’re working on some remaining issues.
We continue to check for possible anomalies as part of our usual business practice. Further improvements to policies and legislation will be made as needed.
We want all our clients to get all the help they need. When we find we’ve made a mistake for a client our principals are:
- We contact clients to sort issues out
- We apologise and put it right in an open and fair way
- We make sure it’s easy for clients to find out what an issue might mean for them
- When we owe people money, we pay it back as soon as possible
The reports below, in chronological order from 2015 onwards, are about cases where we suspected our decisions could be out of sync with the law, together with the findings in those cases.
