Widow wins $67,000 case

Harriet Harker

Harriet Harker was 50 when Work and Income told her two years ago that she would have to repay $67,077 in benefits and penalties because they claimed she was living in a relationship "in the nature of marriage".

She was on a widow's benefit. At $20 a week - which they started taking out of her benefit - she would have had to live to 115 if she was to pay back the debt before she died.

"I was devastated," she says.

Her boarder, a man who had been paying her board for 13 years, had written on a health insurance claim that Mrs Harker was his partner.

They had, indeed, cared for each other since the man came to stay two years before Mrs Harker's husband died.

But when the Winz investigator produced the health insurance claim as evidence that they were as good as "married", Mrs Harker froze.

"I shut down. I couldn't think. I felt as though they were pointing a gun at me. No way was I going to sign anything saying we were in a relationship or a partnership."

A friend referred her to the Rotorua People's Advocacy Centre, and she appealed, first to a benefit review committee in Rotorua and then to the Social Security Appeal Authority.

Ten months later Winz realised it would not win the case, and cancelled the $67,000 debt.

Mrs Harker now has a job as a caregiver. But her boarder has gone.

"I had to ask him to leave because I couldn't handle the pressure."