Beneficiaries will pay the price as mistakes multiply at
the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) because job cuts
mean it is no longer resourced to do its work properly and
monitor the greater use of automated decision-making, the
PSA warns
This follows the latest revelation that MSD
was swamped with paperwork after a law change rushed through
under urgency last year left further beneficiaries having
payments wrongly suspended on top of thousands of pensioners
missing their Winter Energy Payment.
“These aren’t
just administrative glitches, they’re what happens when
you pass complex law changes under urgency, hand them to a
workforce that’s already lost hundreds of colleagues to
cuts, and expect nothing to go wrong,” said Fleur
Fitzsimons, National Secretary for the Public Service
Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi.
“MSD is
accelerating the use of automated decision-making to notify
beneficiaries of changes to benefits, and AI will also be
increasingly used. There will be more problems and mistakes
coming if this Government’s agenda continues.
“If a
rushed law change processed by real people can cause this
much damage, leaning harder on automated decision-making
with even less human oversight risks getting it wrong on an
even bigger scale, and it will be beneficiaries and their
families who pay the price.
“The Minister in charge of
MSD, Louise Upston says she expects MSD to manage its
‘operational workloads’ but stands by while staff are
let go and then expects nothing to change. That’s just
more evidence of how poorly thought through the
Government’s cuts have been all along.
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“MSD staff
are doing their absolute best for the people who rely on
them, often with less time, less support and more cases than
ever before. When you squeeze a system that hard, mistakes
aren’t a possibility, they’re a
certainty.
“Ministers need to stop treating MSD staff
as an infinite resource. Properly resourcing and staffing
the Ministry is what stops real people going without food
and rent money because of a backlog no one had the capacity
to clear,” Fitzsimons
said.
