October 9, 2009

Media Release

ACC figures 'accounting trickery'

The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union says ACC Minister Nick Smith and his handpicked board chair, John Judge, are being deliberately misleading in their assessment of ACC’s financial situation in order to undermine the scheme.

The call is in response to the Minister and the ACC Chair’s scaremongering today over the scheme’s future.

EPMU national secretary Andrew says the figures are based on deliberate accounting trickery.

The Minister of ACC and the Chair of the Board are being deliberately misleading when they claim that the cost of multiple future years’ ACC should be funded out of existing reserves.

“This is a softening up exercise to try and slash ACC and at the same time increase levies on workers and employers.

“The figures provided by John Judge, a Business Roundtable member and senior partner of one of the world’s largest accounting firms, Ernst & Young, refers to estimates of future costs and talks about them as if they should be funded in a single year.

“This is akin to saying that a person’s mortgage should be paid out of a single year’s income.

“This is a blatant accounting sleight of hand, and in the nearly forty years that ACC has been operating it has never done this.

“ACC was set up to make sure that people harmed at work or injured in their own time didn’t suffer the lottery and the indignity of personal injury lawsuits and this principle must remain intact.”

The EPMU is New Zealand’s largest private-sector union, representing 45,000 workers across eleven industries.

ENDS

© Scoop Media