ACC has begun contacting clients who may benefit from a Court of Appeal decision that clarified whether interest should be paid on back-dated weekly compensation.
Sid Miller, ACC's general manager claims, said the court had more clearly defined the circumstances in which ACC should pay interest on back-dated compensation incases where payments had been suspended but later reinstated from the date of suspension.
"The Court of Appeal has confirmed that interest is not automatically payable on back-dated weekly compensation,'' Mr Miller said.
"Instead a number of factors need to be considered, including the nature of the evidence on which ACC relied to stop weekly compensation, and the date on which ACC received all necessary medical and financial information required to make a back-dated payment.
The judgment means that some clients, depending on the facts of their case, may be eligible to have interest on their back-dated weekly compensation assessed or reassessed.
"At this point we can't give an accurate indication of the number of clients that may be affected. We need to firstly identify potentially eligible people, and then undertake a case-by-case re-examination of their files,'' Mr Miller said.
It was likely to take a number of months to identify all affected clients and decide whether they were entitled to interest.
