Wellington’s Accident Compensation Corporation has a blunt definition of recovery. Stop paying someone, and that person is healed. Five weeks of silence follow the final cheque.
No call to the employer. No check on whether the job still exists.
On the ACC ledger, the day the money ends is the day the injury ends. That bureaucratic shortcut is now the centrepiece of a government claim that a decade-long crisis is over. The crisis was real.
For roughly ten years, the system drifted. People took longer to mend.
Simple sprains and broken bones, the kind that heal in weeks, turned into long-term cases. The future cost of all those open injuries roughly doubled. The long-term pool swelled by nearly 15% every year.
By April this year, that growth stopped dead. The government ordered a review, installed a new chair, and demanded monthly reports. The numbers flatlined.
Good news, on paper. But the paper is the problem.
The ACC’s return-to-work figure treats the end of a payment as a return to work. That is not the same thing. The corporation does not verify whether the person actually went back.
It does not ring the employer. It does not ask.
On the ACC’s books, a worker who vanished after the last cheque is counted as recovered. A worker who found a different job, a lesser job, or no job at all — also recovered. The measure is a proxy, not a fact.
The economist Charles Goodhart gave his name to a warning that fits this case exactly. Once a measure becomes a target that everyone is judged by, it stops reflecting the truth. The ACC’s number was always imperfect.
Now it is the number the government uses to declare victory. The incentive is clear: stop payments, improve the statistic.
Whether the person behind the statistic actually gets better is secondary. This is not a small paperwork problem. The ACC exists to mend people.
In exchange for giving up the right to sue, New Zealanders get a scheme that pays for care and some lost wages. The money is a means, not the end.
The end is getting people back to the job and the life they had before. The current measure does not test that. It tests whether the ACC stopped paying.
Those are different questions. The government acted, and fairly. It ordered a review.
It installed a new chair. It made the ACC report its numbers every month.
Those are real steps. But the measure those steps rely on is flawed. The long-term pool stopped growing.
That is a genuine improvement. But the return-to-work figure that supposedly proves the crisis is over is the same figure that could be gamed by simply cutting people off.
The two things — a real recovery and a stopped payment — are not the same. What comes next is unclear. The government has the right structure now: monthly reporting, a new chair, a review.
It has the wrong measure. The ACC could start verifying. It could call employers.
It could track whether people actually return to the job they held before. It could build a figure that reflects reality instead of bureaucracy.
That would be harder. It would also be honest. For now, New Zealand is being told the crisis is over.
The number used to prove it might not mean what people think. The long-term pool stopped growing.
That is real. The return-to-work figure stopped being a problem. That is a choice.
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