The Swamp Report

18 February 2013

ACC apologises for blaming client

An article from the Dominion Post by Phil Kitchin

ACC has apologised to a rape victim after a manager in charge of sensitive claims tried to blame her when a report containing medical information was altered. Instead, it was ACC that had censored important details from a psychiatrist's report about the rape and incest client.
When the client asked ACC last month to immediately correct the doctored document, the corporation said it would get back to her in 10 days' time. On Friday, ACC said its sensitive claims unit branch medical adviser, Peter Dodwell, would send a written apology to the rape victim for causing distress by trying to blame her for altering the medical report. The apology was received later the same day.
The senior ACC staffers involved in the botch-up were Dr Dodwell, and ACC team manager Karmal Mark. Dr Dodwell was asked by ACC to assess a medication claim from the client for treatment for complex mental health issues arising from her accepted ACC claim following years of systemic sexual abuse. But half of the psychiatrist's report was deleted by ACC and the psychiatrist's signature was cut and pasted from another page. The word "abridged" was inserted above Ms Mark's contact details before the report was sent to Dr Dodwell.
The censored material included descriptions of complex conditions that the client suffers from, the fact she required a combination of treatments, and that treatment was beyond a GP's expertise.
After receiving the report, Dr Dodwell wrote: "A line appears to have been deleted ... presumably by the claimant.
"Censorship of medical reports by a claimant is not acceptable and appears to breach the trust ACC demonstrated in allowing the claimant to bar direct contact with treatment providers."
The psychiatrist "clearly wrote something he considered significant to her management", Dr Dodwell said.
When The Dominion Post questioned ACC about the altered report, they delayed replying while they went back to the psychiatrist to confirm his original report was different to the abridged version. The psychiatrist confirmed the full report was his, not the abridged version, and told ACC: "I have now confirmed this on three occasions to ACC. I trust three confirmations are adequate".
Finally, on Friday the corporation confirmed to The Dominion Post that a letter of apology would be sent to the client.
The sensitive claims unit client said it was typical of ACC to make thinly veiled accusations of what could amount to criminal behaviour against clients but she provided documents showing ACC changed the report, not her.
The debacle "is more than outrageous, it is criminal and yet they have had the audacity to blame me for tampering with a medical report".
"I'm appalled, disgusted and very distressed and angry. I am so damn angry about it ... this is quite simply not acceptable," the woman said.
The woman is involved in a separate battle, with ACC having previously accused her of forgery. She said she would vigorously defend the case in court.
In an email, ACC complaints investigator Julie Phillips told the client she needed evidence and information from both sides for her inquiry. The client - who wishes to remain anonymous and has permanent name suppression - said that was rich considering ACC did not bother contacting her to ask if she had changed the medical report before making serious allegations.
Before being appointed medical adviser for the ACC unit dealing with its most sensitive cases, Dr Dodwell was sacked from his job in Australia. In March 2008, he was dismissed from his role as chief medical officer at HealthQuest, a medical screening body for bureaucrats, after he passed on information about a teacher applying for a job. An investigation by a former New South Wales deputy police commissioner David Madden said Dr Dodwell tried to adversely affect a decision to employ the teacher by saying she was being investigated by police for defamatory website postings about him.
"The way in which he [Dodwell] went about informing the Department of Education was inappropriate and not reasonable behaviour of a public official," the Madden report said.

18 January 2013

Judge admits law unfair to abuse victim

An article from the Dominion Post by Shaun Cowlishaw

A mother who suffered more than a decade of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her husband has been denied ACC cover because of a technicality.
The Christchurch woman, who cannot be named, married in 1994 and her husband soon began to display abusive behaviour. That escalated into continual sexual, psychological and physical abuse until she left him 12 years later.
The couple's three children were also subjected to sexual abuse and in 2009 the man was sentenced to five years in jail for offences against the family.
Speaking to The Dominion Post, the woman said the details at the trial of her former husband's abuse were so horrific that she suffered a breakdown soon after and was diagnosed with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
She was granted cover for mental injury but ACC declined to continue weekly compensation because it claimed she was a non-earner when she began counselling in 2007.
In a written district court decision, Judge David Ongley dismissed the woman's appeal despite describing her situation as a "plainly unfair result".
The situation had been caused by the "collision" of two rules affecting entitlement to weekly compensation, he said.
One rule stated that the claimant had to be an earner at the date of injury and incapacity.
But a second rule meant that the date of the injury, in the case of mental injury caused by certain criminal acts, is the date on which the claimant received treatment for that injury.
The woman's application for weekly compensation could only prove that she worked until March 13, 2007, while her first date for counselling for symptoms of mental illness was on April 30, 2007.
With her two daughters still at home, the woman said the decision would have a crippling effect on a strained family.
"I'm sick of having to pay for other people's mistakes, I'm trying to hold the family together and it's not working out very well and now I have this horrible financial burden."
Judge Ongley noted that in many cases someone who suffered mental injury caused by sexual abuse may experience increasingly severe symptoms years after the abuse. That meant it was likely they might be a non-earner when first seeking treatment.
"To add to the unfairness of her situation, it appears that [the woman] had worked to support her family because of the financial irresponsibility of her husband, and that she was not working at various times because she was dealing with problems that her children had suffered from family abuse by their father, including alleged sexual abuse."
But Judge Ongley accepted that ACC had made all the inquiries that could be expected in light of the information presented.
Leading ACC lawyer John Miller, who represented the woman in her appeal, said about 200 people were in a similar position. The situation had been caused by a particular High Court decision that ACC ignored until it suddenly decided to enforce it, he said. Mr Miller was preparing a case involving 30 claimants that would challenge that point of law.
ACC declined to comment.

22 December 2012

Privacy the year's big trivial story

An article from the New Zealand Herald by John Roughan

ACC data leak turned out to contain nothing personal.
Among the Christmas cards I get at work there is always one from the Privacy Commissioner, Marie Shroff. Invariably it contains a good visual gag. This year's features a Slane cartoon of a boy stuck with his head and upper body in a Dutch dyke and a passer-by explains to another, "The leak was worse than first thought".
I hope the irony was intended, because it's time to acknowledge that the biggest leak of the year, the one that the news kept calling a "massive privacy breach" which the commissioner had to investigate, turned out not to be very big at all.
It sounded serious when it was first reported that the personal details of thousands of ACC claimants had been accidentally emailed to one unnamed claimant.Among them were said to be victims of sexual offences.
Then someone on the side of ACC leaked back, naming the recipient and letting it be known she had turned up with a supporter, none other than National insider Michelle Boag, for a meeting where it was pointedly mentioned to her claim handlers that she was holding information she shouldn't have.
After that, the story took off in all directions, not all of them connected to the email accident. Nick Smith had to resign, there was palace intrigue over who leaked a memo from Boag to ACC minister, Judith Collins, who sued two MPs for suggesting it was her.
Grimly, she replaced ACC's chairman, deputy chairman, four board members and the chief executive.
Meanwhile, Labour and the Greens made a sustained attack on ACC's "culture", not just its carelessness with email but its determination to check all claims rigorously and get the injured back to work quickly. The story took on so many dimensions and ran for so long that the Privacy Commissioner's investigation of the original data leak became little more than a footnote.
But there was nothing minimal about her investigation. She appointed an independent review team of KPMG business consultants and a Melbourne company, Information Integrity Solutions Ltd, who together really went to town. From April to August they travelled the country, conducting by their own account more than 150 interviews at ACC's head office, its sensitive claims unit, six branch offices and two service centres.
They went far beyond "client facing" staff to talk to the myriad sections of the corporation that have to see claimants' confidential information: researchers, lawyers, risk assessors, injury prevention officers, assurance services, business intelligence, actuarial people, plus the complaints investigation team.
They talked to "external stakeholders": claimants, their advocates and associates, holding a workshop with some of them. They performed "walk-throughs" of the corporation's email handling habits, compared its information security practices with those of some other organisations, and much, much more.
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 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.

16 October 2012

Help for rape victims under threat

An article from Stuff by Kirsty Johnston

Rape and sexual assault victims in Auckland may lose access to the city's only 24-hour helpline due to a funding shortfall.
The HELP Foundation will be forced to lay off specialist staff and cut services after the Government refused it $200,000 to keep the line going, spokeswoman Aimee Stockenstroom said. News of the shortfall came despite a commitment from the Government to work closely with HELP to establish a sustainable telephone service for the future in December 2011.
"For victims of sexual assault and rape, the potential to suffer devastating mental health consequences is high and early intervention must be seen as a survivor's right," Stockenstroom said.
HELP takes about 12,000 calls a year from victims of sexual assault and rape, or around 250 calls a week. Stockenstroom said one in five women were sexually assaulted or raped in their lifetime.
"It is not ethical, and shocking for us to think in the middle of the night when the terror can be the most overwhelming, there will no longer be someone there at the end of the phone."
Green MP Jan Logie said it was appalling it had only taken the Government a year to renege on its commitment to the helpline. Logie said while sexual violence reporting rates were increasing, the Government was not reflecting that in its funding, despite widespread acknowledgement that the services were vital.
"In 2009, the Taskforce for Action for Sexual Abuse identified the urgent need to increase funding to support services," she said.
"This has not happened and now even the current meagre resources are being reduced."
Previously, the help line was funded by ACC, however that was axed in May 2009. Interim funding was provided until last year, when a cross-agency group comprising the Ministries of Justice, Social Development, Health and ACC was set up to discuss a long-term solution.
Stockenstroom said HELP wanted to continue to work with the Government but simply could not continue without enough money.
More information can be found on www.helpauckland.org.nz.
The foundation is also taking donations at any branch of ASB bank. A donations account will run from 12 October 2012 through to 26 October 2012. The account number is ASB: 12 3205 0175 043 00.

05 October 2012

ACC reined in over waiver

An article from Stuff

The Privacy Commissioner's office has again reined in ACC after it asked clients to sign a form accepting their personal files may be lost, then claimed such a form gave it indemnity.
The waiver forms were introduced after a series of client privacy breaches, including emailing of the personal details of more than 6700 clients to claimant Bronwyn Pullar.
ACC used to send sensitive files to claimants' houses via courier. It has now asked clients to sign a contract accepting the files may not reach their destination. The form states the client accepts risks, including "non-delivery, delivery to an unauthorised person, or interception by an unauthorised person".
Outgoing ACC chief executive Ralph Stewart told TVNZ: "They need to indemnify us, just in case it does go to the wrong place and they haven't used the options we've offered them."
But the Privacy Commissioner's office contacted ACC to put him right after TVNZ approached it about the comments. Mr Stewart later said the corporation would take responsibility for its mistakes.