Welfare bad debts are being repaid

Press, 14 September 1988, Page 50

Welfare bad debts are being repaid

By

DEBORAH MCPHERSON

A campaign by the Social Welfare Department to recover bad debts is proving effective.

Up to $160,448 in bad benefit debts had been recovered in the last four weeks by the department’s Christchurch office, said the assistant director of corporate services, Ms Chris Hobcraft, yesterday. . That figure included up to 173 debts recovered by the department, said Ms Hobcraft. Up to $690,000 had been recovered by the department’s field worker since April. The debts included overpayments for unemployment benefits, domestic purpose benefits, sickness benefits and the family benefit. Another two field workers were expected to be employed before Christmas to help collect debts. The drive to collect

welfare debts began after last June. Until then, the department had no way of counting the amount of debts owed. Since May, the department had also referred up to 186 debts, totalling $101,395, to a contracted debt-collection agency, Bay Collection Agency. Up to 22 full repayments had been recovered, and some partial repayments, totalling about $6OOO. The debts referred to the collection agency mainly related to overpayment of the unemployment benefit, which the department would not otherwise have had the resources to recover, said Ms Hobcraft. “We certainly have recovered more debts than we otherwise would have, because we just do not

have the field force to go door to door.” Social Welfare Department records were kept confidential, however, and were not used by the debt-collection agency, which had its own computerised information network. The debts- sent to the agency to be collected averaged about $545 a person, but ranged from the threshold of $lOO up to $14,000 in one case. The collection agency was also helping to find thousands of New Zealanders who were not paying their liable-parent contribution to the department. Liable parents are those named as the other parent when a custodial parent applies for the domestic purposes benefit. Most are men.