Winz staff steal $1m of benefits in two years

Nearly $1 million in benefits has been stolen by 28 Work and Income staff over the past two years.

Figures issued under the Official Information Act show Work and Income staff have had their fingers in the state kitty to help themselves and friends.

Only $167,266 of the stolen money has been ordered to be repaid.

The highest amount of discovered fraud is $163,504, obtained when a staff member manipulated the system to pay a personal benefit.

That person is serving a 21-month prison term, but has not made any reparations for the theft.

Other thefts include the setting up of false benefits with the help of friends, which resulted in $91,530 being taken. Reparation orders have been made on only $18,000 in this case.

The department said yesterday that it was confident most fraudsters were being caught.

The level of reparation was up to courts to decide.

National MP Bob Simcock said staff theft undermined the welfare system for beneficiaries.

"The system has so many challenges because of the relationship between Work and Income and beneficiaries," he said.

"When beneficiaries see staff members stealing they have the right to feel very aggrieved."

The amount of money taken in some cases raised questions about the department's ability to catch fraudsters quickly, he said.

Downtown Community Ministry director Kevin Hackwell said the public needed assurances that the department had a rigorous set of checks in place to catch fraudsters.

"Although it's a statistically small number given the size of the department, you have to wonder if they are employing the right people for the job," he said.

Sue Christie, human relations general manager for the Ministry of Social Development, which oversees Work and Income, said yesterday that it was , very confident it was catching most fraudsters.

In a system that dealt with $13 billion a year it was serious about finding theft.

It had a national internal fraud co-ordinator to manage internal investigations, and new staff were subjected to criminal conviction checks.

Any staff member found to be committing fraud faced dismissal and the matter was referred to police.

In the past year there had been a 40 per cent drop in the number of staff caught taking money.

Ms Christie attributed this to education programmes warning them about the consequences of theft.

Some cases went undetected longer than others because of the timing of periodic checks and trawls of computer systems.

"It's important to note that the 28 staff caught during the past two years represents only 0.36 per cent of the 7557 staff employed by the ministry."

- NZPA