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Social Security Act 2018

Enforcement: sanctions and offences - Sanctions for breach of obligations other than young person or young parent obligations - How number of failures is counted

242: Failures that cannot be counted

You could also call this:

“Some mistakes don't count when keeping track of rule-breaking”

When counting how many times you haven’t followed the rules, some failures can’t be counted. If something happened more than a year ago, it doesn’t count towards your current number of failures.

The day that counts as when you failed to follow the rules is the day the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) decides you didn’t have a good reason for not doing what you were supposed to do.

Even if a failure happened more than a year ago and can’t be counted now, it might still affect you. The MSD can still use old failures to decide if they need to reduce your benefit or apply other consequences, based on how many times you didn’t follow the work rules or other rules in the past.

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243: Exclusion of sanction if failure is subject of prosecution under Education and Training Act 2020, or

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Part 5 Enforcement: sanctions and offences
Sanctions for breach of obligations other than young person or young parent obligations: How number of failures is counted

242Failures that cannot be counted

  1. A failure cannot be counted if it occurred more than 12 months before the failure for which the calculation is made.

  2. For the purposes of subsection (1), a failure occurs on the date MSD decides that the beneficiary has failed, without a good and sufficient reason, to comply with the appropriate obligation.

  3. This section does not affect the implementation, after the 12-month period, of a sanction based on any prior calculation of the number of failures by a person to comply with the appropriate work-test obligation or other obligation imposed by this Act.

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