Income Support Data Clean-up Contributes to Register Increase

  • Peter McCardle
Employment

Employment Minister Peter McCardle said today an increase in the number of registered unemployed in August was due mainly to the impact of a recent data matching exercise between Income Support and the New Zealand Employment Service (NZES).

Registered unemployment rose during August by 7,198 (4.4%) to 170,624.

"The Employment Service has advised me that the results of the data matching exercise showed that at the beginning of August, 7,523 people were receiving the unemployment benefit, although they were not registered with NZES." said Mr McCardle.

"These people were required to register during the month in order to continue to receive their benefit."

"The administrative activities of the past few months illustrate clearly that people need to be cautious about drawing any conclusions about the relative contributions of economic factors and policy changes to the register figures." said Mr McCardle.

"The April 1 work-test changes required a significant number of new beneficiary groups to register. This, in conjunction with the influence of Income Support's data matching exercise last month make the register increasingly difficult to compare with historic data."

"It is interesting to note that while the register has risen in August by just over seven thousand, the number of people receiving unemployment-related benefits fell by approximately 1400."

The NZES register is an administrative record of unemployed clients assisted by the Employment Service and is not the official measure of unemployment. The official measure of unemployment is the quarterly Household Labour Force Survey.