[nessa]

Work and Income staff 'in scams to gain bonuses'
15 September 2005
By PAUL GORMAN

Frontline Work and Income staff took part in widespread, targeted fraud to secure pay rises and bonuses, a former staff member alleges.


The accusations are being levelled by former Ministry of Social Development (MSD) internal auditor and now whistleblower Graeme ***, who left the ministry in October 2003.

Documents released to *** under the Official Information Act (OIA) through the Ombudsmen's Office support his claims and reveal concerns from Work and Income employees about the apparent manipulation of databases to qualify for pay rises and bonuses.

The thresholds for the rewards were set by key performance indicators (KPIs).

Scams included creating vacancies and claiming clients had filled them when they had in fact found their own work, changing the ethnicity of clients to Maori or Pacific Islander to gain extra KPI credits, and retrospectively offering grants or subsidies to employers to enable a vacancy to be added to the database.

*** said that as an internal auditor he had talked to many frontline employees who participated in, or at least knew of, KPI fraud. "Hundreds" of staff members were involved in the scams, he said.

One of the documents released under the OIA is a May 2003 email from a staff trainer, who says KPI fraud "is an ongoing problem".

AdvertisementAdvertisement"In many instances, staff create a vacancy to place that client into work rather than self-place and receive no credit or KPI – this is widespread and not at the lower end of occurrence," the trainer said.

"Other issues revolve around changing client records to obtain KPIs, such as changing ethnicity to gain KPIs for Maori and Pacific Island clients when the client is not either.

"Lastly, I am concerned that we often purchase KPIs by paying taxpayer money in the form of subsidies and grants.

"I see all above examples as fraud, as the main reason staff do this is to obtain a pay rise or bonus, and many staff feel trapped into doing these things as their performance is measured against those that cheat to obtain their outcomes."

Another email, from July 2003, said: "Brokers have been setting up false vacancies, with several agencies stating approval has been given by region to create false vacancies for previous referrals.

"I think this in itself is suspect, unless we have a clear process in place. This practice also puts me at unfair disadvantage when measuring my performance.

"There have been lots of these non-vacancies filled this month by referring suspended clients. If I could do that here ... I too would achieve great results."

Work and Income is brushing off the allegations of staff fraud, saying it investigated them about two years ago and found no evidence to support claims by concerned staff.

Work and Income head Ray Smith told The Press the inquiry found problems with the computer system were to blame for the apparent creation of extra job placements and changes in ethnicity.

"We found no evidence to substantiate the claims. We honestly haven't. What we did find was that there were some issues with the system," he said.

"If they (staff) entered something in error, they couldn't go back and change it. On the face of it, what might look like someone doing something deliberately, wasn't. We did rectify it.

"If they were (changing the database), I'd be really disappointed and would want to take the appropriate action."

Smith said job placement had been only one of about 16 key staff measures and was not used now.

National welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins last night called for an external inquiry into the allegations, saying "another internal inquiry from Winz to investigate Winz" was not needed.

The allegations should be referred to the police or the Serious Fraud Office, she said.

"If National leads the government after Saturday, I can promise the first thing on my agenda will be to get to the bottom of this," Collins said.

A spokeswoman for Social Development Minister Steve Maharey said the matter was operational and not an issue for Maharey to comment on.

About 3000 Work and Income staff shared $6 million of performance bonuses last year. The total was 8 per cent more than amounts paid the previous year.


http://www.stuff.co....0845a11,00.html

[flowers]

Wish!

[MadMac]

APPARENT ...

MANIPULATION ...

OF ...

DATABASES.

:wub:mmmmm Very interesting ... "...changing client records..." , "...some issues with the system..." ... how come I have heard similiar words from ACC?

Have my ACC files been subject to "apparent manipulation of databases????
Simple...YES/NO

How come my ACC files are full of contriductions,typo errors,data entry errors,clerical errors,human errors,computer errors,errors that aren't errors that turn back into errors ... glorified pile of non-senisical absurd crap ...

:wub:Have a great day everyone ... enjoy all the experiences that have been created ...

[Hatikva]

The latest on this from STUFF website ...

Agency knew risk of abuse was high
16 September 2005
By PAUL GORMAN

Work and Income knew the recording of client information was open to abuse several years before staff began speaking out about frontline fraud.

The government agency commissioned a risk study in 2000 that showed the two greatest uncontrolled risks for its business were the use of employment subsidy funding and the accuracy of employment recording.

Documents released to The Press this week revealed frontline Work and Income staff appeared to manipulate databases to ensure they exceeded key performance indicators (KPIs) and earned pay rises and bonuses.

Whistleblower Graeme ***, a former Ministry of Social Development (MSD) internal auditor, has put the spotlight on scams where staff created vacancies and claimed clients had filled them when they had in fact found their own work.

Other alleged scams changed the ethnicity of clients to Maori or Pacific Islander to gain extra KPI credits, and retrospectively offered grants or subsidies to employers to enable a vacancy to be added to the database.

Work and Income head Ray Smith said an investigation of the alleged fraud had found no evidence to support those claims.

*** said yesterday that Work and Income senior management signed off both the original risk profile in 2000 and a reviewed version two years later.

The study involved Work and Income staff and external consultants and used criteria where a risk score of 50 or higher was considered totally unacceptable.

The risk that employment assistance subsidies were not appropriate or cost-effective scored 228.75, while the risk that transactions and outcomes were not recorded accurately was 259.5.

"In other words, experts in the business itself were saying the risk level was off the planet," he said.

"These scores did not change between the creation of the first profile and the 2002 review. So it was agreed by the people in the business that nothing had been done in that time to effectively reduce the risks. When I left in October 2003, no further review had been done."

MSD spokeswoman Bronwyn Saunders declined to comment yesterday and said questions for Smith on the risk profile would be treated as an Official Information Act request.

National Party welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins said feedback yesterday had made her even more convinced an external inquiry into the allegations was necessary.

*** said he had been floored by the response from Social Development Minister Steve Maharey that the matter was an operational one. "Has it not occurred to him that systems manipulation creates shonky stable employment outcomes that feed through into the performance results he, as Minister, reports to Parliament on behalf of Work and Income?"

http://stuff.co.nz/s...2013a11,00.html

[MG]

MSD is adapting a number of ACC's tricks into the way it runs it organisation. KPIs, as many readers of this site know to their cost, result in manipulation and bullying by case managers determined to get their bonuses. Under ACC's KPI scheme, a culture of quick and dirty exits from the scheme has become the norm. IMHO, ACC needs a good going over by an independent expert, as the Labour Party conference in 2000 promised but never delivered.

[nessa]

Dunno about youse lot...but I reckon many outfits the world over get up to similar scams and tricks...figure they network much more easily than the poor person on the street etc Not that long ago when overseas, I was coming across some pretty grunty material from whistleblowers ...stuff also showing contracted doctors also getting bonuses for disbenefiting or disentitling claimants struggling with the state invalid myths Twas bad enough finding clerks left right and centre up to no good and witnessing all the media advertising about fraudulent invalids ..but when it seeps into other groups ...not good sorry

[nessa]

Sorry folks...twas and still am getting my head around this material as best able ... looking looking great tho and similar to stuff which would surface overseas is always welcome

I'm not a techy sort so still have not figured out how to get the latests posts in threads as a reliable or regular return here for me Then *My assistant* keeps playing up &/or closing all the windows on IE for me, or else it just returns a system error from the board Real pain as to mke matters worse this puter is on XP and im more used to win98... so when I go to look at pages they be the old ones as the puter is storing them in temp files somehow...ive clicked settings andd will delete them as much as possible but thats made it worse for me as some pages will refresh then showing new but not another and I think theres been no new replies etc.....rrrrggghhh...sorry I have this problem with couple forums I belong to now so know its me stuffing it up probably

Sorry for going offtopic -WINZ Staff fraud head back on.... I think Im become immunised to all their shenanighans now...just never surprised with finding the powermongers up to no good etc etc Can almost smell them now I reckon VBG... tho I am gonna probably now say one thing which I pray never happens in this forum folks Well try to explain meself better mehopes

One of the overseas forums I lurked in or tried to post whenever I could and which had a much greater membership and daily postings from folks struggling was fairly well infiltrated with PTB cronies or nasties etc etc *Beneficiaries* who gave across very incongrous messages it seemed to my mind ... and believe me they could be brutal to some folks in real bad pain ... now and again they'd also slip their masks by mouthing invalid mythology or else simply be promoting a powermonger agenda very subtly or covertly etc

As the board had so many members and traffic it was easy for them to harm others IMHO ..and certainly I presumed genuine disabled did not have the energy or attention 24/7 to hunt these trolls out all the time as woulda been a full time job in itself... although many did try thank goodness...but course the nasty would rejoin under a different alias and try different tricks etc etc I know I got on their wrong side a couple of times and then could face a wee gang of trolls all having a nasty headshot ... which is probably why sometimes I may still hesitate before hitting the send buttons etc Not so much that I dont want to post as Ive nothing left to lose probably... but worry as I've had friends come under fire as well then... so try to make sure my words are making sense &/or cueing up the good guys without hurting the good guys etc The trolls will corrupt anything as always ... but if any newbies around, I worry they may be frightened or discouraged if they may see an online weird event or battle perhaps? Thank goodness the administrators in here are wise to all these sorta tricks and can keep this forum safe as possible for members...but knowing its a multiple fulltime job being done without resources .... means the admins are even more awesome IMHO folks... and without them I'd be in a right mess so they're kinda like lifesavers I reckon

Nowadays folks... yep my brain is much more exhausted and Ive lost so many grunty documents or links along the way from just trying to stay together ... and the ole memory recall is as shattered of course still ... which ... is why I try to highlight any independent material as soon as I find it ... even if Ive not been able to mentally process it yet meself or know what to do with it yet etc Others may benefit while I'm rolling around here mehopes

I have a huge amount of respect for Whistleblower Graeme *** as I know few parts of the hard path he is walking as some common to advocacy worlds... and even this world of whistleblowing has its own insidious ugly ugly realities which can overwhelm people with a conscience IMHO

[doppelganger]

Ness check that you are working on line when the above prob happens

Click file and in the drop down thing will be words 'work off line' if there is a tick beside it click 'work Off line' and you be able to work on line.

This may be your prob and like u I'm not the best at the computer yet but ACC are forcing me to learn.

[nessa]

Thanks Dopple

Gonna go and see if I can find it in here ... try and get it sorted soonest... all over the place at the minute but at least with cheap broadband ..can leave the puter as needed...just getting back on with kids here is half the battle but at least they know now not to click my windows cos I spend half my time muttering trying to find them again so I can find my train of thought...well if Im lucky that is

One blessing is I've just been gifted a voice activated program... so Xms soon and next pressie maybe a second hand scanner mehopes ... THANK GOODNESS FOR GOOD PEOPLE ...would not be here if not for them so have pretty good faith and hope experiences onboard now thats fer sure

Anywyas so as this puter is probably bit poorly and needs sorting out big time...Im gonna try and get someone to help get things bettered up for me here... told my daughter she can learn the gumf first as she's put on the messenger progs here so she can voice chat for free to her overseas mates but they came with few ad thingies which have to run same thing for somereason .... but knows wot you mean about trying to learn different ways to keep aware with ACC and others in full health..even if we cant keep up all the time at least we can keep on keeping on and course we never unlearn LOL Maybe forget or get it all mixed up and overwhelmed ...but we're all survivors

[grumpy]

WINZ manager jailed for benefit fraud
Print this story Email this story to a friend Email Alert
Work and Income NZ
Jul 14, 2006

A Christchurch man who invented an identity to claim benefit payments from Work and Income totalling more than $100,000 has been sentenced to two years and five months in prison.

Nguha Benjamin Moses, 27, had pleaded guilty to using a forged document and to seven charges of dishonestly using a document while he was a case manager at WINZ.

His offending started when he was handed a birth certificate found on the footpath in 2001 which he altered and used to claim various benefits from WINZ over the next five years.

Judge Murray Abbott said the offending tarnishes the public's view of WINZ and in the past similar cases have made life difficult for other employees. He told Moses to consider what he has done to the agency's reputation.

Abbott said he gave Moses credit for his early guilty pleas and a reparation payment of just over $11,000 which would be made within the next two weeks. Abbott said he accepted the money was used to feed Moses' gambling addiction.

[awryly]

This is what happened in the UK when evidence of employment bureaucratic corruption emerged in 1998 (ironically, the year WINZ was created in New Zealand):

Jobcentres fiddled the figures

By David Hencke, Westminster Correspondent

Thursday January 8, 1998

An investigation is to be launched to verify that 1.75 million unemployed really did go back to work last year after an internal inquiry revealed that jobcentres fiddled placements by an estimated 320,000 in the run-up to the general election.

Leigh Lewis, chief executive of the Employment Service, has asked the National Audit Office to verify his staff's figures for the current year after auditors proved that as many as one in five job placements made last year could have been faked.

The fake jobs are in addition to official figures revealing that the Employment Service missed its target of 1.97 million placements for 1996-97 by 312,000. Altogether it means that only 1.336 million people got back to work - 564,000 below the 1.9 million claimed by Gillian Shephard, the former Tory employment secretary, before the election, and 634,000 below the official target.

The huge shortfall - revealed in the Guardian last April - was caused by staff not coping with the introduction of the new Jobseeker's Allowance and being given unrealistic targets to get people back to work. Staff also received performance-related bonuses, depending partly on the number of claimants they placed in jobs.

Only the fact that Whitehall's performance-related pay scheme in jobcentres was based on wider objectives than just placing people in jobs has prevented the National Audit Office recommending that staff's pay should be docked.

The original scandal came to light after whistleblowers among staff in London and the South-East revealed double-counting and fake job scams. In one case in south London, new job starters at the McDonald's fast-food chain in Croydon appeared as job placements at several different jobcentres.

Last year the Government launched an internal investigation into allegations about the massaging of jobs figures at three north London jobcentres. Further investigations were conducted into alleged scams in Stevenage and south London. A report will be published by the Employment Service with this year's accounts.

Meanwhile auditors decided to check 15 jobcentres in three other regions of the United Kingdom, selected to give a national picture. In 21 per cent of placements, they found no evidence to support claims by staff that the people had got jobs. New checking procedures were introduced.

Now the National Audit Office is to verify whether all the 1.75 million who should be placed in work by jobcentres by this April have found real jobs. Other targets for this year to be verified by auditors for accuracy include:

That 75,000 Jobseeker's Allowance claimants out of work for two years got real jobs.

That 150,000 unemployed people were placed on training programmes.

That 4.8 per cent of disabled claimants got real jobs.

That 90 per cent of all Jobseeker's Allowance claims are dealt with within seven days.

That all claimants turned down for Jobseeker's Allowance can get an appeal result within 10 days.

Sir John Bourn, the Comptroller and Auditor General, has decided that this year's exercise will be the first of a series of annual checks on the agency's figures.

The decision means that auditors will be able to monitor in depth the centrepiece of government policy - Gordon Brown's £3.5 billion Welfare to Work programme - where ministers have made ambitious claims that every person between 18 and 24 will be offered a job or training and promised to extend the scheme to the 25 to 35 age group.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Guardian Media Group plc 1998


This is what happens in this country:

1. The Christchurch Press publishes a couple of sensationalised articles (above) to help its circulation figures and then abandons the issues;
2. Labour Minister Maharey ducks for cover: ["A spokeswoman for Social Development Minister Steve Maharey said the matter was operational and not an issue for Maharey to comment on."]
3. Judith Collins feigns interest to catch votes on the eve of a general election (here)
4. Other political parties snooze on.

WINZ must be laughing its socks off.

Helen Clark must be ecstatic.

[awryly]

As an evidential starter, here is a document showing how one WINZ management support staffer (not an auditor) pleaded with the chief executive, Peter Hughes, for action on corrupt accounting practices he had routinely witnessed as part of his job.



Hughes set up a token data integrity review group (which included me - a corporate auditor), that did nothing remotely approaching what was needed to even start to address the issues.

Just like Judith (here) Collins and her National Party colleagues, huh?

Attached File(s)

•  Memo_to_CEO.PDF (114.72K)
  Number of downloads: 32

[awryly]

Asked under the Official Information Act less than a year later whether he had issued any instructions on matters of data integrity fraud, Hughes could not even remember the so-called data review group he had himself set up.

.  Hughes_employment_data_integrity.PDF (103.63K)
Number of downloads: 35

No doubt this was his more or less honest endorsement of what he had really intended it to be worth.

This is what I had to say to Hughes about his fraud policies in January this year:

FRAUD ZERO TOLERANCE POLICIES

"Among the enquiries I have made under the Official Information Act have been several designed to elicit the extent of your commitment to a zero tolerance policy on staff fraud.

I am aware and have copies of the numerous statements you have made in relation to the direct misappropriation of MSD resources and assets (that is, ‘financial’ fraud). There are none that I (or others) know of that relate to KPI operational performance fraud (which is about performance data manipulation).

There also appear to be none that you know of.

On 27 December 2003, I asked you under the Official Information Act for any “statements and directions, written or otherwise, about the management of Work and Income data integrity issues, given by you to your general managers, in particular the National Commissioner” [of Work and Income].

In your letter of 30 June 2004 you replied: “The search conducted by Mr Gandy has not turned up any information matching your request. I can confirm for you that neither myself nor the National Commissioner, Work and Income recollect a direction by me of the sort you describe.”

I could offer opinions about why that was so. But I hardly need to. The evidence was before you. For whatever reasons, you chose not to act on it.

[awryly]

WINZ clients should be very afraid about how their personal information is being used.

They should be continually asking: is WINZ using my information for my benefit or purely for WINZ's own benefit?

Here are some examples of how WINZ uses it purely for its own benefit:

• WINZ actually manages to get you a job (which is far less common than it pretends). They are short of their Maori or Pacific Island client placement quota for the month, so they change your ethnicity to an ethnicity (Maori or Pacific Islander) you don't have. Once the placement is captured, they change it back - if they remember. WINZ has what it needs and you'll never know.
  
  
  
• You go overseas, to prison, die or go off benefit for some less dramatic other reason such as full-time study. WINZ creates a fictitious job and pretends it placed you into it. You never find out because you are out of their system and won't know (or be bothered) to ask even if you return to their system.
  
  
  
• You find your own job without WINZ help. You have to notify WINZ of this because it affects your benefit entitlement. WINZ uses that notification to pretend it has helped you and simply creates a fictitious job placement and employment outcome.
  
  
  
• WINZ measures its employment performance by how long you stay in employment it has arranged or 'assisted'. These days the measure is x out of y weeks. When I was auditing there, it used to be 91 consecutive days after job placement.
  
  If you were so awkward as to re-enrol with WINZ short of the 91 days, this is what commonly happened:
  
  The type of benefit they gave you on your return would not be a 'work-tested' benefit (usually the unemployment benefit). That would tell WINZ's employment client management system (SOLO) to automatically stop the count towards the 91 days, which is when the desperately-desired brownie point kicked in.
  
  Instead, they would put you on a non-tested benefit (sickness or invalid's benefit). These did not stop the count. So, in the fullness of time, you would reach the magical 91-day figure and appear in government statistics as a "stable employment outcome" (or these days as a "sustainable employment outcome"), even though you were actually unemployed and again back on benefit.
  
  You would not know this had happened because the amounts of unemployment, sickness and invalid's benefits are exactly the same. Even in the highly unlikely event that you did know, you probably would not care – because you would have been getting the benefit income you needed.
  
  This also helps to explain why sickness benefit statistics have increased exponentially over time. (Something else Judith Collins has rabbited on about for years without actually understanding the dynamics.)
  
  
  
• As well as successfully referring you direct to an employer who has a registered vacancy, WINZ takes credit for what it calls "assisted self-placements". In other words, WINZ helps you to prepare for work by putting you through some sort of job training or development programme, or helps your job placement with a cash subsidy to your potential employer or a grant to yourself. You find your job yourself, but WINZ takes a cut of the credit.
  
  An internal audit of training programmes in 2003 showed that 30-40% of payments made to external training providers on behalf of WINZ clients were invalid for one reason or another. A number were clearly almost certainly fraudulent. Here is a page from the audit report that established this figure:  Regional_contracts.PDF (92.76K)
  Number of downloads: 26.
  This was an early report draft. The hard statistics, in the usual Ministry of Social Development way, were removed (note deletions on right of page) and replaced with weasel words to avoid too much accountability should the report ever come to light.
  
  Employment subsidies (Job Plus and the like) paid to employers are also widely known to be notoriously shonky inside WINZ.

Here's what often happens. WINZ needs to 'assist' you. It's how it helps to justify its employment outcomes and thus its existence. So it will 'assist' you whether you need assistance or not.

 You may be sent to programmes you do not need.
 You may be 'sent' to programmes without your knowledge: it didn't actually happen, you don't know about it, but the system says it did because a staffer or local manager needed it to, and made it so.
 Your employer may get an employment subsidy because WINZ has manipulated your personal information to make it look as though you qualified for subsidy assistance when in fact you did not. You may never know – or care.
Here's an example:  aaaaaa.PDF (322.09K)
Number of downloads: 26
 You may be granted a Work Start Grant of $1 to give the appearance of 'assistance'. This was an old favorite because it was so easy to set up. Of course, you never got the $1 or even knew about it.

And so it goes on, and on.

In other words, WINZ needs you whether or not you need them. Isn't it wonderful to be so needed? Unless, of course, you also happen to be a tax-payer who has to fund such nonsense.

Here is what yet another principled WINZ staffer had to say about what he saw going on at first hand:

 xxxxx.PDF (222.73K)
Number of downloads: 39

More later.

[awryly]

This may be of interest to WINZ/ACC clients.

Some years ago I was told by a local ACC manager (also an ex-employment centre manager) that he had offered WINZ $3000 for each ACC client WINZ took off his books.

I assume (since he was telling me about something he was doing himself) that the account was accurate. Whether it was ACC national policy, I do not know. Nor do I know what happen to any monies that may have changed hands.

Gotta ask yourself as an ACC client. Have I been head-hunted?

Gotta ask yourself as a taxpayer: what the hell's going on?

[awryly]

Why does WINZ manipulate your records?

Well. there are various reasons but most of all WINZ managers need to be seen to be 'successful'. As do their political masters.

Here's a little discussion about birthing elephants that went on among frontline staff when the 2004 targets were being developed:

 yyyyyyy0001.PDF (137.1K)
Number of downloads: 39
What it identifies are frontline concerns about what they were increasingly being expected to achieve.

Of course, there are other factors: the Christchurch Press, for example, identified that peformance bonuses to WINZ staff in 2003 amounted to 6 million dollars - 8% above the previous year and up on average $1.5 million per year since 2000. Promotion is of course another.

[awryly]

And where was Audit New Zealand in all of this? This is where. Again from a letter to the MSD CEO:

"AUDIT NEW ZEALAND

I am strangely unimpressed that you should finally wish to involve Audit NZ in a meeting with me. With the exception of the stable employment ‘mistaken placement’ exercise (on which you have, for wont no doubt of something better to point to, mistakenly placed far more weight than is warranted), Audit NZ has been remarkable for its absence from the examination of matters central to the performance of a public employment agency’s operations. No doubt senior management thought it had better things to do with the million-odd dollars MSD and its predecessors expended to secure its services. And no doubt the terms of reference for Audit NZ’s assistance reflected this over the years.

You make much of Audit NZ’s review of your ‘internal control system’. What you fail to say is that these reviews, with one small exception, did not include testing for employment data integrity. Its reports show this. The one exception was the exercise you mention relating to its one-off audit of ‘mistaken placements’. As you know very well, mistaken placements are at the fringe of data manipulation practices. They are not at the core of the allegations your own staff have leveled against you. There are many, many other ways – identified by your Wellington regional quality assurance staff [summaries below] - in which data is deliberately manipulated.

Put bluntly, I have little faith in Audit NZ to now do more than parrot the position of its paymaster. That was not the case in the NZ Employment Service pre-1999. While I was audit manager there, Audit NZ (Stephen Lewis) expected me to provide solid evidence that there was integrity in the employment results the Minister of Employment reported to parliament. I did. Nothing remotely similar happened in WINZ/DWI/MSD - despite the best efforts of myself and a few others. Audit NZ did not appear to care."

Manipulation summaries:  Bad_Practice_Released_p1.PDF (326.34K)
Number of downloads: 29;  Bad_Practice_Released_p2.PDF (175.6K)
Number of downloads: 26

[anonymousey]

certainly think WINZ have been learning lots of the tricks from others like DWP and ACC awryly:(

twill take me some time to process your info but wanted to say tis great to see you posting such important information and insights

[awryly]

Did you know that your public employment agency - WINZ - makes extensive use of private employment agencies to do its work for it?

In management speak, it's about working 'smarter' (which is, of course, taking credit for something you don't actually do). It's also a cute way of concealing fictional placements to fictional jobs on a large scale.

Have a look at the following documents: (Note: the "suspended list" referred to in some of these documents is a print-out of clients whose benefit has recently been cancelled for any reason. A "suspended" client is in fact no longer a client at all.)

 Agencies1.PDF (115.21K)
Number of downloads: 42
 Agencies2.PDF (143.33K)
Number of downloads: 33
 Agencies3.PDF (95.65K)
Number of downloads: 33
 Agencies4.PDF (60.38K)
Number of downloads: 36
So what, might you ask, did the Ministry of Social Development/WINZ national office do about it? In essence, zilch.

A couple of internal corporate auditors flagged the issue with senior management -  Agencies5.PDF (70.65K)
Number of downloads: 30
But no independent review occurred. The people responsible for creating the problem in the first place were again allowed to review themselves. That was the typical and most reliable WINZ solution if you were in real trouble.

It's a pity Judith Collins' tongue-in-cheek solution to the problem (here) was just so much political pipe smoke.

[awryly]

NoDrsl, on Oct 8 2006, 07:46 PM, said:

In this page in the file, the Job title, Custom title and Winz Assisted(y) flag are false

OK, NoDrsl. You will know know whether your record is accurate or falsified. You say it's falsified. [NoDrsl mysteriously deleted this post and all subsequent ones. Paranoia, I expect.]

Now, how many people have read this thread? Not many.

How much of a coincidence would it be to have one of them come up with a falsified WINZ record? Low, low, low. For a start, hardly anyone asks for their records.

So what does that mean for the rest of the WINZ 'population'? Their records are getting falsified routinely, perhaps?

The risk of falsification is extraordinarily high. In a previous audit life (not with WINZ of course, which would not tolerate awkward independent review), I used to send out copies of personal records randomly to our clients asking them to confirm their authenticity. This was a strategy to guard against exactly what NoDrsl has identified. The return rate was high, as you might expect. Most people have a keen interest in what bureaucracies hold on them. If frontline staff were playing ducks and drakes with clients' information, as they often were, they would hear about it. Very loudly.

WINZ would not even begin to conceive of such controls.

It does not suit their agenda.