If you have ever had ACC decline a claim and gone looking for context, you will have hit a wall almost immediately. The first question anyone in that position asks is the same. How often does this happen? Out of every hundred claims that go to ACC, how many get told no?
The answer is not in the public record.
Newswire has spent the past week working through what ACC actually publishes. The headline finding is that the country’s accident compensation agency has placed 163 separate datasets on data.govt.nz, the central open data portal for the New Zealand government. None of those 163 datasets gives you, in plain language, the decline rate.
What ACC actually publishes
ACC’s open data footprint is large but lopsided. The vast majority of the 163 datasets are one-off responses to individual Official Information Act requests on narrow topics. Claims involving horses. Claims involving washing lines. Claims involving manholes. Claims by particular sports, decades, age bands and occupations. Each is useful for the person who asked the original question, and not much use for anything else.
Sitting beneath that one-off layer are six datasets that are updated on a regular cadence. They are the General Claims series, the Work-related Claims series, the Motor Vehicle Injury Claims series, the Falls series, the Traumatic Brain Injury series, and a 2020 dataset on review outcomes. Those six are the closest thing the country has to a regularly maintained, longitudinal picture of ACC’s caseload.
None of them publishes the volume of declined claims by year.
The accepted-only filter
The natural place to look would be the General Claims dataset. It is the broadest of the regular series, covering every category of personal injury claim. The cover sheet of that dataset, however, makes clear what it does and does not include. The dataset is filtered, in ACC’s own words, to records where the cover decision is “Accept”.
In other words, the headline series is by design a series of accepted claims. The volume of declined claims is filtered out before publication. There is no public version of the General Claims dataset that retains both accepted and declined records side by side.
That single design choice explains a lot. The General Claims series is the data resource a researcher, a journalist or a member of the public would reach for first, and it is structurally incapable of answering the decline rate question.
The Annual Report number
There is one place left to look. ACC’s Annual Report. The most recent edition, for the year ending 30 June 2024, contains a table titled “Historical claim volumes, by type”, running back to the 2019/20 year. The table reports what ACC describes as “registered” claims, year by year.
For the 2023/24 year, the table shows 2,038,410 claims registered. The General Claims dataset, for the same year, shows roughly 2,041,500 claims with cover accepted.
The two numbers are within 0.2 percent of each other.
There are two ways to read that. One is that ACC’s actual decline rate is functionally zero, which would mean New Zealanders almost never have their claims rejected. The other is that the figure labelled “registered” in the Annual Report is, for practical purposes, the accepted-claims figure with a different label. Either of those readings would matter, in different ways, if the country could see the underlying breakdown. The published data does not let you.
What is missing, and what comes next
What is genuinely striking about this is not that the decline rate is hard to find. It is that ACC publishes so much else with such precision. There are claim counts by month, by region, by occupation, by demographic group, by injury type, by Sport and Recreation classification, by ICD-10 code. There is a dataset on claims involving manholes. There is no dataset, anywhere in the 163, on how often the agency says no.
This piece exists to set the question down. It does not answer it. We have spent some time obtaining the underlying decline rate data, and we will publish that work shortly.
In the meantime, if you have been declined by ACC and are trying to work out your next move, Newswire’s resource page on your rights when ACC says no sets out the review process, the appeal pathway and the time limits that apply.
With the general election now five months out, Newswire has built a free voting tool that matches your views on health, ACC, transparency and the rest of the policy landscape against every party in Parliament. Have a play and see where you land.
Have you ever had an ACC claim declined? What happened next, and did you appeal? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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