By Maggie Tait of NZPA

Wellington, June 24 NZPA - ACC is looking at moving some new claims to private providers, it confirmed this morning.

The corporation is already trialling private provision for people who have been on ACC for a long time but is now looking at new claimants too, a staff newsletter said.

ACC said it was a matter of seeing if that was an effective way to operate and Minister Nick Smith said it was about finding the most efficient way to work.

In April ACC said it was contracting out to third parties -- insurance companies -- administration of some long-term claims.

"It's also looking at whether some of the front line case management services can be contracted out," Dr Smith confirmed to media this morning.

An official said to start only a small proportion of the roughly 1.5 million new claims a year would be contracted out, possibly around 3000 cases. A trial would be run for about two years to see how that went.

Labour ACC spokesman David Parker said it was privatisation.

"They are moving new cases not just old cases out to the private sector and we find out about this indirectly," he told NZPA.

"It's privatisation by stealth. They are privatising functions that are currently publicly provided."

Dr Smith told reporters the Government was open-minded about the idea and people would have the same rights to have private providers' decisions reviewed as they did under ACC.

"What we are attempting to do is improve ACC's performance and its case management and if the private sector can play a role in that the Government says good job."

Pressed over whether the move was about making savings, Dr Smith said ACC would want to see "more efficient management of ACC".

He said the public was grumpy about levy increases.

Earlier, appearing before a select committee, ACC chief executive Dr Jan White said the move would provide a benchmark for ACC providers to compare against.

"There would be very, very tight monitoring."

ACC Futures Coalition spokeswoman Hazel Armstrong said private provision was inferior and tended to be unreasonably tough on claimants.

"It will result in new accident victims having their claims scrutinised to the tiniest detail, payments being delayed or refused altogether on spurious grounds and injured workers being forced back to work before they are properly rehabilitated."

During the committee hearing Dr Smith said ACC was in much better shape, had reduced liabilities and was solvent, and would return a $2 billion surplus including investments.

Mr Parker said that showed there was no need to change the model which was cheaper than other countries and was working well.

Dr Smith said Cabinet had not decided yet whether to open up the work account to competition. The Government expected the final stocktake report on that at the end of this month and decisions would follow a couple of months after that.

Dr Smith said the Government would "very robustly test any policy proposals in this area" before it making any changes.

The committee was also told that there were more reviews of ACC's decisions being heard but more were going in ACC's favour.

In 2008-09 there were 8200 reviews, for the past year the figure was about 9000.

Mr Parker said there had been a 50 percent increase in cases going to review under National but Dr Smith said the trend for reviews to increase was well established before National came into power.

Overall there were fewer claims, a 4 percent drop over the last 12 months. Dr Smith thought that was due to a cultural change, for example doctors were no longer putting through claims they did not think were accidents.

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