HOUNDED! PRODUCER: PETER STEVENS REPORTER: ANNA KENNA Karen Intro: It was a nightmare from which they couldn't escape. A Nelson couple hounded by local bureaucrats, pursued for money they didn't have, and apparently didn't even owe. Letters, phone calls, demands that went on for years. Ian and Linda Worrall didn't know how to put a stop to the harassment. All they knew was - they'd done nothing wrong. A High Court judge has described what happened as a "chapter of errors" that "beggars belief". Anna Kenna with the story. IAN WORRALL: A lot of stress, a lot of worry. Is it going to go away? Is it going to come back? You can’t fight somebody that big on your own. LINDA WORRALL: It’s been going now for nearly eight years and they have literally hounded us into the ground. ANNA (V/O): This is a case that’s generated mountains of paperwork, lined the pockets of several lawyers and stolen the best years of a young couple’s life; a tortuous tale of how little people can get clobbered by bureaucracy. A story that shocked even a High Court judge. IAN WORRALL: So I put the electrodes on around the area of the pain. And then we just plug the electrodes into the tens machine, it’s giving 125 electric shocks a minute. And I just sit here for a while like this. ANNA (V/O): Ian Worrall’s daily ritual to ease the pain, the result of a motorbike accident, then a medical mishap that left him with a serious bone disease. IAN WORRALL: If you turn it up too high, it hurts quite a lot. ANNA (V/O): These days Ian enjoys a stroll on the beach with his family but for years his leg was so painful he couldn’t stand, let alone walk. IAN WORRALL: I had some pretty heavy medication for it sometimes and I didn’t know who I was or where I was. Yeah it was just pretty bad. ANNA (V/O): But not as bad as the eight years of hell Ian Worrall says he and his wife have suffered at the hands of WINZ. The couple’s troubles began in 1992. Ian was on ACC at that time but after an operation on his leg he tried to go back to work. IAN WORRALL: Four years sitting on a benefit is just not very good. You kind of like lose your direction after a while so it was time to go out and get on. ANNA (V/O): Ian got a job labouring at a Nelson fish processing company. IAN WORRALL: I worked there for two days stacking crates and all that, and it was just too much. The pain was too much. ANNA: It must have been disappointing for you. IAN WORRALL: It was very disappointing, yeah. ANNA (V/O): But there was to be another disappointment. ACC wouldn’t reinstate Ian’s weekly payments. The couple were told... LINDA WORRALL: We now belonged to Social Welfare and we were no longer their problem. ANNA (V/O: So the Worralls went to WINZ - or Social Welfare as it was then called, and signed on for the unemployment benefit. (TO CAM) But the Worralls still believed Ian should be getting ACC so they took the matter to court. It took two years but they won their case and ACC was told to reinstate Ian’s earnings related compensation and to backdate it. In other words ACC had to pay him a lump sum for the two years he’d missed out on. Problem was, Social Welfare had already paid him for that period. LINDA WORRALL: The first thing I said to Ian then was, we need to go and see WINZ because they’ve been paying us, fully aware you can’t get two benefits and fully aware that we wouldn't have ever asked for that. ANNA (V/O): At WINZ an employee tried to work out how much they owed. LINDA WORRALL: He came back with a figure in excess of 40-thousand dollars and I laughed but he laughed as well, and said I think I've made a mistake, and I said yes so do I. It just seemed a huge, huge amount of money for a 2-year period and i thought something’s not quite right with it. ANNA (TO CAM): But Linda was told not to worry. She and Ian hadn’t received the backdated money yet so the departments would simply work it out between them. ACC would reimburse WINZ and pay any extra to the Worralls. (I/V): So you thought they’d sort it out between them? IAN WORRALL: Oh yeah, that’s what you expect. They're two government departments. ANNA (V/O): When 27-thousand dollars appeared in the Worrall’s bank account two weeks later they thought the departments had settled up and it was the extra payment they were entitled to. They paid 9-thousand dollars to their lawyer, spent 14-thousand on a car and paid some bills. Then, a shock in the mail, a letter from WINZ. LINDA WORRALL: It said that we owed in excess of 40-thousand dollars to them for overpayment of benefits and that we had seven days to pay it. ANNA: What about you Ian? When you saw there in black and white that you owed in excess of 40-thousand, what did you think? IAN WORRALL: It couldn’t be right. There’s no way it could be right. We got just over 20 thousand in the bank. Here they were wanting 42-thousand, so you’ve got to naturally assume it’s a mistake. ANNA: The Worralls didn’t believe they owed the 27-thousand let alone 40-thousand. It was only later, when they were checking through documents, that they began to understand what had happened. The ACC paid WINZ only a portion of the money it had asked for. That’s why WINZ went after the Worralls - went after them with a mission. LINDA WORRALL: Every day there were letters in the post from WINZ. They were always demand letters. They were always pay within seven or fourteen days. There was never one, there was always two, one addressed to Ian, one addressed to myself. And that was every day, Monday through to Saturday's mail. There were messages on our answer phone, every day. There were phone calls made by them every day. It was constant pressure. JAMES O'NEILL: I thought it was the worst case of its kind I’d ever encountered frankly. ANNA (V/O): Christchurch Barrister, James O'Neill. He took over the case two years ago. JAMES O'NEILL: They were a very large department that was committed to a course of action, and wouldn’t recognise or acknowledge that there were errors being made, and that the people they were pursuing were the victims of those errors. ANNA (V/O): But even now the Worralls can’t understand how WINZ worked out the huge sums they were demanding. Even the department seemed confused. LINDA WORRALL: Some letters came with 36-thousand on, others came with 26-thousand, 29-thousand. ANNA: What did you make of that? LINDA WORRALL: We didn’t know what to make of it. JAMES O'NEILL: To this day I don't understand their mathematics and I don’t think they did either because letters would apologise for the mistakes in previous letters. LINDA WORRALL: We didn't know how much to pay, and honestly, we didn't think we owed it. We really didn't think we owed it. We thought they'd made a mistake. ANNA (TO CAM): In 1996 the Worralls took their case to the Social Security Appeal Authority, which blamed ACC for the problem, for not reimbursing WINZ enough. But that got the Worralls nowhere, because ACC said it was the fault of WINZ (or Income Support Services as it was then called), and that they should sort the matter out. A senior ACC manager wrote: “I think it would be reasonable for ISS (WINZ) to reconsider the circumstances in which this error occurred and to reconsider whether any adjustment to their decision regarding the Worralls is appropriate. We would be prepared to partake in any mediated discussion in this matter. We recognise that Mr and Mrs Worrall are victims in this matter.” JAMES O'NEILL: If that advice had been taken up this whole sorry saga could have been concluded years ago. If the parties were prepared to stop blaming each other, that is ACC and WINZ, for what had happened, to sit down and actually work things out, recognising that Mr and Mrs Worrall were not responsible for the predicament they found themselves in. ANNA (V/O): But for the Worralls the nightmare continued. For another four years WINZ debt collectors continued to hound them. One phone call threatening to bankrupt them, almost drove Linda to suicide. LINDA WORRALL: I hung up the phone. I sat down and cried which was quite commonplace here for a number of years. I don't know, I guess all I can say is, something in my mind kind of went and I just decided that I just didn’t want to be here anymore. I believed if I wasn’t here, they wouldn’t be able to recover it, ANNA: Would you ever believe that that would be the toll that this fight would take? IAN WORRALL: No, no never. I don’t believe anybody's got a right to push you that far. DR JIM AITKEN: The toll was great, both physically and psychologically. ANNA: Dr Jim Aitken was the Worrall's GP. He watched the couple’s health deteriorate under the stress. DR JIM AITKEN: There was real anxiety depression within the household and they both changed personality quite dramatically. ANNA: How did it make you feel as their GP, sitting on the sidelines and watching that? DR JIM AITKEN: It made me feel very sad that people can be destroyed or almost destroyed by bureaucracy. ANNA (V/O): After Linda’s suicide attempt WINZ laid off for a while but soon the pressure was back on. At this stage Ian was studying computing and working part time. WINZ got an order to take money from his wages. IAN WORRALL: They were only after probably about 50 dollars a week at that stage but I was only doing six hours work a week, and that was our total income at that stage. ANNA: What was your reaction to that? IAN WORRALL: Very angry actually. I was very angry. ANNA (V/O): The letters, the constant phone calls and attempts to tamper with their limited income began to take an even greater toll. LINDA WORRALL: I got a really bad pain, sort of up my neck into the back of my head, it sort of felt that someone had hit me with an axe. One of the worst, like headache pains I'd ever had. ANNA (V/O): Linda suffered a mild stroke while she and Ian were arguing over the debt. LINDA WORRALL: I had to almost learn to talk again. The words were in my head but I couldn’t get them out to make a proper sentence. ANNA: Linda says it was her son Ben who got her through, insisting she read to him every day. JAMES O'NEILL: They were victims of a system that was inflexible and intransigent and was prone to human error, and an apparent belief that its alright to spend tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money, pursuing what they define as a debt of a lesser magnitude. It's not good economics. ANNA: But WINZ would argue by law they had to chase an apparent overpayment. JAMES O'NEILL: No. The Act gives them the power to recover overpayments but the Act also gives them a discretion to write off overpayments. They’ve argued consistently that it wasn’t a suitable case for writing off the debt. I personally can't think of a better case. ANNA (V/O): So O'Neill took the case to the High Court, where what would normally have been a fairly dull procedural matter, turned into high drama. Justice Doogue was conducting the judicial review. He described it as the most disturbing case he’d heard in all his years as a judge. (TO CAM): Justice Doogue had no patience for WINZ explanations for pursuing the Worralls. He said he found the department’s conduct astonishing and their attitude in letters they'd written to the Worralls beggared belief. He said the department should have tried to mediate the matter long ago and it should never have ended up in court. JAMES O'NEILL: I’ve been practising for 17 or so years as a barrister and I’ve never encountered a case where a judge has been so blunt in his condemnation of the conduct of a major department of state. ANNA (V/O): Justice Doogue ordered WINZ to write off the debt which he said had arisen because of errors by the department and its officers, contributed to by ACC. In his written judgement he said: "It is fair to say, without disclosing sad details of their personal lives, that the Worralls are people deserving of benefits and welfare. Their lives have been difficult and the consequences of the present dispute, extending as it has done over such a substantial period of time, have clearly contributed to their problems. They are innocents in this affair." LINDA WORRALL: I think the part that really hit home was the part where he said we were innocent because we have been from day one. IAN WORRALL: It was nice to actually feel that someone was listening to us and actually seeing what had gone wrong over the years. ANNA: What will stick in your mind mostly about this case? JAMES O'NEILL: The joy on Mrs Worrall's face when it was all over. DR JIM AITKEN: They wanted to clear their name and they wanted to hold their heads up high and they have, I'm sure, done the right thing by fighting this to the end. ANNA (TO CAM): 20/20 wanted to ask WINZ about its response to the judge’s comments but they declined to appear on our programme. Instead they sent us a written statement in which they say they believed they had a responsibility to recover the debt. However they do accept that some aspects of the service Mr and Mrs Worrall received, were less than ideal. They say they've written to the couple this week to express regret for the distress and frustration they no doubt experienced. (V/O): Little comfort for the Worralls who say the fight with WINZ has cost them almost everything. They’d like to sue the department for compensation but they can’t afford it. LINDA WORRALL: If I had the money I would do it, in a heartbeat, for what they’ve done to my family. I would do it ten times for what they’ve done to my family. ANNA: All Linda and Ian Worrall ever wanted was to be independent of welfare. Despite the turmoil of the last eight years, they’ve achieved it. With the help of ACC, Ian has studied and gained a host of qualifications in computing. He and Linda now work at the Nelson/Marlborough Institute of Technology. (I/V): Has there been anything positive come out of this? LINDA: Yeah, one thing. That they have to write their debt off. They can’t ever write to me again. They can’t ever ring my house, and it’s a win. It’s a big win for us. Backannounce: The ACC has now changed its policy. In cases like this it reimburses WINZ the full amount of any duplicated benefits. Too late for the Worralls. [17/06/2001]