The Privacy Commissioner says the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has misused its investigatory powers while pursuing benefit fraud and has unjustifiably been intruding on the lives of beneficiaries.
John Edwards told TVNZ1's Breakfast MSD went even so far as to request telecommunication companies to give out very detailed information about MSD clients.
"[For example] text messaging information which has even included intimate photographs that a beneficiary might have sent to a sexual partner," Mr Edwards said.
"They [MSD and the client] then sit down in a meeting and are a confronted with a photograph saying, can you explain this? In my view that's disproportionate, excessive and highly intrusive."
Read more: MSD systematically misusing powers while pursuing people it suspects of benefit fraud, inquiry finds
According to the Privacy Commissioner other examples of MSD overstepping the mark include, the government agency failing to ask beneficiary client's for information before seeking it from a third party and requests including unnecessary and sensitive information (in one case a woman's birthing records).
Mr Edwards told Breakfast:"They [MSD] haven't kept pace with the development of the law which oversees how these intrusive powers are applied and that law has developed by taking into account the increased richness of data that you can get from banking records, from police records and from all other segments of society.
"We are leaking data everywhere and that means a request for information is a very deep dive into the details of somebody's life," he says.
MSD accepted the recommendations of the Privacy Commissioner and said changes have been made in its approach to high risk fraud investigations.
“The small number of cases we investigate using this measure are at the high end of the spectrum where there are serious, often multiple, allegations of fraud over a significant period of time, usually involving large sums of money,” Viv Rickard of MSD said.
Mr Rickard said MSD’s current practice was introduced publicly in 2012 in response to the Government at the time “taking a harder line on benefit fraud and speeding up investigations”.
"Ninety-five percent of the time people didn’t provide the necessary information when we asked them directly, meaning we had to go to third parties anyway, delaying investigations."
"We take a prevention-first approach, using conversations with clients and data matching agreements to detect and stop anomalies early. We don’t investigate lightly,” Mr Richard said.
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