Privacy Act 2020

Annual Report

Purpose: To enable MSD to suspend or reduce the benefits of people who have an outstanding warrant to arrest for criminal proceedings.

Justice disclosure to MSD: Justice provides MSD with the full name (and alias details), date of birth, address, Justice unique identifier and warrant to arrest details.

Compliance: Compliant.

Technical information

Information matching provision	Social Security Act 2018, Schedule 6, cl 15
Year authorised	2013
Year commenced	2013
Programme type	Confirming eligibility
Unique identifiers	Justice unique identifier
Online transfers	Yes

System description
Each day Justice extract Warrants to Arrest information based on the following criteria:

the warrant must be at least 28 days old
the defendant may not have name suppression
the defendant must be at least 17 years old as at the date of the extract
the warrant is a defendant in criminal proceedings only
the warrant must not be issued in the Youth Court
the defendant must not have a confidential Justice name and address.

Justice provides MSD, by secure online transfer, the full name (and alias details), date of birth, address, Justice unique identifier and warrant to arrest details for individuals that have met the selection criteria.

MSD compare the Justice information against MSD held information based on full name and date of birth. The matching process takes into account any transposition between first and second name and specific digit transposition errors which occur with date of birth information.

All singular exact matches are processed automatically. All other potential matches are manually verified before any adverse action process is initiated.

Recent activity:

	2016/17	2017/18	2018/19	2019/20	2020/21	2021/22
Match runs	313	305	312	291	314	313
Records received for matching	5,646,105	5,435,435	5,465,534	4,865,372	5,099,612	5,156,633
Possible matches identified	6,596	6,742	7,853	8,789	9,631	9,393
Notices of adverse action	6,418	6,577	7,679	8,753	9,513	9,373
Warrants cleared	5,647	5,899	7,028	7,933	8,837	8,416
Warrants cleared without benefit suspension or reduction	4,215	4,539	5,254	5,432	5,662	5,201
Warrants cleared with benefit suspension or reduction	1,432	1,360	1,774	2,501	3,175	3,215
Warrants not cleared and benefit has remained suspended/cancelled	360	216	445	686	827	1,005

This match was suspended during the COVID 19 lockdown to avoid penalising individuals during the disruption of operations.

This programme was previously authorised by section 126AC of the Social Security Act 1964.

The utility of this provision was assessed in a report Ministry of Social Development information matching; review of statutory authorities for information matching (September 2019).