The New Zealand Taxpayer’s Union can reveal through information obtained from an Official Information Request that ACC has spent more than $251,000 contracting The Research Agency (TRA) to administer a monthly survey tracking public engagement and trust.

Commenting on this, Taxpayers’ Union Communications Officer, Alex Emes, said:

“ACC wasting over a quarter of a million dollars on a run-of-the-mill survey shows what happens when you give bureaucrats bottomless budgets to work with. There’s not a chance waste like this would be signed off in the private sector.

“Putting aside the fact that ‘monitoring external engagement’ has little to do with ACC’s actual job, they’re not even doing this well. For the sake of a survey targeting only around 6,900 over the space of a year, $250k that should have been spent on solving real health issues is now in the pockets of some very lucky consultants.

“Taxpayers don’t expect their hard-earned money to be blown on bureaucratic exercises that do nothing to reduce injury rates or improve services. ACC needs to focus on what it was created for, not frivolous projects that don’t serve the public.”

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