| 16 NOVEMBER 2000
The Government has ordered the Accident Compensation Corporation and Inland Revenue to get together and work out how much to pay an Auckland couple who battled the IRD for years.
Revenue and Accident Insurance Minister Michael Cullen said he had asked IRD commissioner John Perham and ACC chief executive Garry Wilson to appoint an independent assessor to
decide the level of compensation Jan and Murray Willis were due. "Given the nature of the dispute with IRD over the ACC categorisation of their worker, it is sensible that the cost of
compensation to be split between them," Dr Cullen said in a statement. Mr Perham yesterday told a parliamentary select committee he
"absolutely apologises both personally and on behalf of the department" for the "agony" the couple suffered during their 14-year clash with IRD.
Then, in an about-turn on the department's position just two days earlier, he said they should be compensated for their losses.
Dr Cullen said he was impressed with Mr Perham's apology, which also earned high praise from one of the department's harshest critics.
ACT MP Rodney Hide - the self-confessed "most savage critic of the IRD" - said Mr Perham did a wonderful job at the committee yesterday.
"That's what New Zealanders expect - they expect a civil service that, when it makes a mistake, it admits to it and it apologises and moves to put it right.
"That's what we haven't had in the IRD . . . and I want to be among the first to congratulate John Perham." Mr and Mrs Willis ran an Auckland-based engineering business
employing up to 400 people. In the mid-1980s they were in dispute with IRD over the ACC categorisation of their workers. They were told to pay or be
wound up and in the following years they borrowed and sold assets to pay $100,000 to the department. In 1993, the IRD sent a letter threatening to wind up the
company, based on the couple's failure to appeal against a letter sent to them in 1990. However the 1990 letter gave no indication of any right of appeal.
The couple said the subsequent publication in the New Zealand Herald of a winding up order effectively destroyed the business when their bank refused to continue to support them.
IRD later withdrew the winding up order when it was discovered the company had not been told of an appeals process.
 | | A police investigation has since found the letter was illegally
tampered with but could not prove who did it. The IRD official involved in the case has since died. In 1996 it was found the company was owed $83,446 by the
department, although it took IRD another 13 months to make the payment. In that time the department continued to demand payments for more levies.
Mr and Mrs Willis told the finance and expenditure select committee they wanted compensation and an apology. They estimate losses of $1 million made up of interest on
overpayments, loss of income from the since collapsed business, legal fees and losses from a "fire sale" of company assets. - NZPA | | 
