The ACC’s return-to-work rate is built on silence. Five weeks of it. The corporation stops paying a person, waits five weeks, hears nothing — and marks them recovered.
No call to the employer. No check on whether the person actually has a job.
No confirmation they’re back on the tools or behind a desk. Just a gap in the billing cycle, interpreted as a healed life. That silence is now the centerpiece of the ACC’s claim that New Zealand’s long-term injury crisis is over.
For a decade, the scheme’s costs swelled. The future bill for open claims roughly doubled.
The long-term pool grew nearly 15% every year. People stayed stuck on weekly compensation for sprains and fractures that should have healed. By April this year, that growth stopped cold.
The ACC says the fix worked. But the fix might be a mirage. The ACC counts the day it stops paying as the day a person got better.
That is its return-to-work figure. The figure is what the Government, the new chair, and the monthly reporting regime are all watching.
And the figure is what Charles Goodhart warned about decades ago. Once a measure becomes the target everyone is judged by, it stops telling the truth. Think about what the silence covers.
A person on weekly compensation loses their payments. Maybe they found a new job.
Maybe their old employer took them back. Maybe they gave up and stopped engaging. Maybe they’re still injured but too exhausted to fight the system.
The ACC does not know. It does not ask. Five weeks of quiet, and the books say: recovered.
That is not harmless paperwork. The ACC is using that number to tell the country the crisis is over.
The Government acted, fairly. It ordered a review. It installed a new chair.
It demanded monthly reports. Good on them for getting that far.
But if the number they are all watching is hollow, the crisis has not ended — it has just gone quiet. The real stakes are concrete. People who are not actually back at work are people who are not earning, not contributing to the scheme through levies, not rebuilding their lives.
They are people who may end up on other welfare, or on no support at all. The ACC’s future cost projections, the ones that roughly doubled over the decade, were built on real open injuries. If those people are being silently dropped from the count, the future cost is still there.
It has just stopped showing up in the monthly report. The ACC exists to mend people.
That is the point. The money was never the point. The point is getting you back to the job and life you had before.
You cannot know whether that happened by watching your bank account go quiet. You have to look at the person.
You have to ask the employer. You have to check. The ACC does none of that.
It lets five weeks pass, then calls it a recovery. Goodhart’s warning was precise: the measure becomes the target, and the target stops reflecting the truth. The ACC’s return-to-work figure is now the target.
The growth in long-term claims has stopped. But whether the people are actually back — that is a question the silence cannot answer.
