Excerpt from summary
In August 2023, the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) received Official Information Act (OIA) requests from two journalists asking for information on how much had been spent on staff functions over the last year. The requestors asked for the details of any event that cost over $10,000.
When gathering the information, ACC initially identified one event, a farewell for a Deputy Chief Executive, at a cost of $17,287.29.
On reviewing this, ACC considered that some travel expenses which had been included in the event costs, would have occurred regardless of the farewell as those staff were in Wellington on ‘other work’. Subsequently, ACC removed those travel expenses from the overall cost of the event. Having excluded the travel expenses, the cost of the farewell fell below the $10,000 threshold in the OIA requests.
ACC subsequently advised the OIA requesters that ACC had not identified any events in scope of their requests.
Based on the information before me, I have formed the opinion that ACC’s decision making on the information requests was unreasonable and wrong.