Update on historical PIAWE remediation

icare has now written to approximately 280,000 impacted workers across NSW to encourage them to seek a reassessment of their weekly benefits in case they are owed money. icare has also run a state-wide communications campaign.

We have so far received over 11,352 responses and we are reviewing these files. We will provide an update on this by the end of the year.

icare has also now completed the proactive review of 9,474 of the most vulnerable and exposed government and private sector injured workers files as first identified.

A total of 314 injured workers have found to have been underpaid. All of these workers have been contacted and of these 100 have accepted and received a payment. Of all the claims reviewed the miscalculation and underpayment rate is 3 per cent and on average the underpayment is $25.81 per week over the life of a claim.

Injured workers have always had and will continue to have the ability to have their payments reviewed at any time. They can do this by lodging a request through our PIAWE assessment form page.

Deloitte review

The Deloitte review, announced by the NSW Treasurer and Minister for Customer Service in April 2021, was commissioned to assess the effectiveness of the remediation program.

Deloitte's experts in similar remediation matters presented its report to the cross-government steering committee, chaired by the State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) and comprising icare and NSW Treasury, established to review the icare PIAWE remediation program.

Six recommendations for improvement of the program were made, which will be implemented in full. These include that icare:

1. Undertakes targeted analysis to ensure errors are not continuing beyond October 2019.
2. Establishes a threshold based on total weekly benefits paid that would lead to additional workers being selected for proactive assessment.
3. Ensures contact is made with open claims and any claims that have been pro-actively reviewed that had insufficient information further contact to be made.
4. Continues to monitor and conduct ongoing data analysis based on remediated claims and claims assessed to identify any indicators that would lead to special consideration of certain workers or groups.
5. Explores whether workers on maximum weekly benefits can be identified through the data to exclude them from the review process.
6. Creates a single end to end document detailing the key areas of the remediation approach.

Read the full Deloitte report (PDF 1MB)

The independent report includes advice in respect of proactive payments, commonly used as part of remediation cases where information is unavailable.

icare's management are currently considering advice on whether there is appropriate mechanisms to make such payments as part of its objective to get benefits back to the people who need them most. The cross-government steering committee will also provide input into this consideration and any recommendation will be signed off by the icare Board.

The next step for the Deloitte review is to consider and make recommendations on existing statutory and regulatory requirements and practices.