Illustration of ACC signage outside a modern office, with documents in the foreground and Auckland’s skyline in the background.

ACC paid former chief executive Megan Main $160,630.50 in lieu of notice after her early departure and incurred additional legal, training and travel costs that took the total expenditure to nearly $200,000.

The payments have emerged through an Official Information Act response obtained by the NZ Herald, resolving one of the central questions surrounding Main’s unexpectedly early departure from the Accident Compensation Corporation.

Main received $160,630.50 gross in lieu of her three-month notice period, while ACC also incurred nearly $10,000 in legal costs connected with her departure.

ACC additionally paid $13,840 for an Institute of Directors governance course and associated travel that Main undertook after leaving the organisation.

ACC board chair Jan Dawson said the course had been approved before Main’s departure.

The disclosure provides an answer to whether financial terms were attached to Main leaving early.

It does not explain why ACC and Main agreed to bring her departure forward.

Main’s five-year appointment ran from November 15, 2021, to November 14, 2026, according to Public Service Commission records. Her disclosed remuneration for 2024/25 was $714,000, placing her among the highest-remunerated Crown entity chief executives reported by the Commission.

In December 2025, ACC announced Main would not seek reappointment when her five-year term ended in “late 2026”.

At that point, ACC said Main would continue working with the board to ensure a smooth transition to a new chief executive.

Seven months later, the timetable changed.

When ACC announced Sid Miller as its new chief executive on July 21, it said Main would leave the organisation at the end of that month.

Miller would not begin until September 21, leaving Deputy Chief Executive Corporate and Finance Stewart McRobie to serve as acting chief executive in the interim.

Main therefore departed roughly three-and-a-half months before the scheduled November 14 end of her appointment.

Dawson has now said Main and the board “mutually agreed her end date would be brought forward”.

ACC has not publicly provided a detailed explanation for why that agreement was reached.

Asked by the NZ Herald why the departure was brought forward at a cost approaching $200,000, an ACC spokeswoman reportedly said the organisation had “nothing additional to add”.

The disclosure also raises questions about comments made by Main shortly before she left.

On July 29, NZ Herald Wellington business editor Jenée Tibshraeny discussed Main’s departure on Newstalk ZB.

“She was due to end her five-year term in November. She’s going early. She says sort of suits her family better,” Tibshraeny said.

During an interview that month, Main was also asked whether there had been an exit payment.

Her answer, according to the Herald, was: “No. No.”

The newly disclosed $160,630.50 was characterised by ACC as payment in lieu of Main’s three-month notice period rather than a separate severance or settlement payment.

That distinction is important.

The payment does not necessarily mean Main received compensation beyond what she was contractually entitled to under her employment arrangements. But it does establish that ACC paid her more than $160,000 after agreeing to bring forward a departure that had previously been expected to occur later in the year.

The $714,000 figure previously disclosed for Main represents remuneration, not necessarily base salary alone. Public Service Commission guidance on Crown entity chief executive remuneration describes remuneration as including components such as base salary, performance pay, employer superannuation contributions and other benefits specified in an employment agreement.

The financial question surrounding Main’s departure has therefore changed.

It is no longer whether money was paid because her appointment ended early.

It was.

The unanswered question is why ACC and Main agreed to bring the departure forward, resulting in a six-figure payment in lieu of notice and additional legal costs when her five-year appointment was already approaching its scheduled conclusion.

The question comes at the end of a period of significant scrutiny and reform at ACC.

An independent performance review commissioned by the Minister for ACC found serious issues within the organisation.

The review, conducted by Finity Consulting, found ACC had experienced a loss of operational focus, inefficient claims management and declining effectiveness in rehabilitation support.

According to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, this meant some injured people were taking longer to recover than necessary and the resulting claims were costing more than the funding ACC had obtained for them.

Finity also found an earlier change in case management “did not work” and that concerns about it were not taken seriously.

The review identified a weak performance culture, weak accountability across the system and a lack of focus on core performance measures and monitoring.

Some of those problems predated Main.

ACC’s Next Generation Case Management model had been developed years before she became chief executive, with its national rollout completed in 2020, more than a year before Main took up the role.

But problems with the system continued well into her tenure.

A 2022 post-implementation review acknowledged further work was required to improve the model’s efficiency and responsiveness.

Main said one lesson was that ACC should have better aligned the migration of claims and staff from the old system, which might have prevented a build-up of overdue work.

Another internal review, carried out in 2023 and later obtained by RNZ under the Official Information Act, found gaps between the model’s original blueprint and what had actually been delivered.

By 2024, ACC had reinstated one-to-one case management for thousands of clients.

Some of the internal findings were striking.

According to the review, “The process to carry out a Welcome conversation (excluding having the conversation) is 49 steps.”

Employees who had been expected to train for their new roles within six to eight weeks were instead taking more than a year to become fully competent, while staff were handling significantly more complex cases than originally planned.

ACC’s March 2024 quarterly reporting also said the case-management model was struggling with the volume of managed claims as volumes returned to pre-Covid levels.

Main told RNZ that Covid-19 and the subsequent increase in demand had not been anticipated when the system was designed.

Claims management was not the only area under scrutiny.

On March 20, 2025, the ACC board commissioned an independent review into workplace culture following concerns about behaviour, conduct and internal processes.

The review was led by Pip Muir, chair and partner at law firm Simpson Grierson, and Doug Craig, director of RDC Group.

The reviewers spoke with 322 staff and received 378 written submissions from an organisation employing about 4,500 people.

Its conclusions were mixed.

The review found ACC had a strong purpose and people committed to the organisation’s work. It specifically concluded that ACC’s culture was not “toxic”.

But that finding came with an important qualification.

“ACC’s current workplace culture is not positive overall,” the review concluded.

It identified inconsistent behaviour by leaders, a lack of past accountability and low trust in internal complaints processes.

The review also found ACC’s policies, systems and procedures for dealing with inappropriate conduct were not fully in line with public service good practice.

An April 2025 internal audit cited in the review also found ACC’s recruitment and onboarding practices were not aligned with good-practice frameworks “in many aspects” and rated them “very high risk”.

Main acknowledged shortcomings when the findings were released.

“We know there have been some poor behaviours that we could have done more to address,” she said.

Then came an adverse finding from the Ombudsman.

In August 2023, ACC received Official Information Act requests from two journalists seeking details of staff functions costing more than $10,000.

ACC initially identified a farewell for a deputy chief executive costing $17,287.29.

The organisation subsequently removed travel expenditure from that figure on the basis that staff involved were also in Wellington for other work.

Doing so reduced the calculated cost of the farewell below the $10,000 threshold, and ACC told the journalists it had identified no events falling within the scope of their requests.

A whistleblower later raised concerns about how the information had been handled.

Following an investigation, Chief Ombudsman John Allen concluded ACC’s decision-making on the information requests was “unreasonable and wrong.”

Main subsequently apologised to the journalists.

“I apologise for ACC’s failure to disclose information that we should have,” she wrote.

ACC accepted that its approach had been unreasonable.

The newly disclosed costs surrounding Main’s departure give that episode renewed relevance, although the circumstances are different.

The Ombudsman finding concerned how ACC responded to information requests about a staff farewell. Main’s payment arose from her employment arrangements. Both, however, place attention on transparency around expenditure involving ACC’s senior leadership.

Privacy was another recurring issue during Main’s tenure.

Main arrived at ACC in what the organisation itself later described as the “immediate aftermath” of the 2021 Snapchat privacy incident.

ACC had suspended staff after discovering client information had been shared in a private Snapchat group.

Its investigation, completed on November 30, 2021, found the actions of those involved breached ACC’s Code of Conduct and resulted in a privacy breach involving client information.

An independent review of ACC’s access to and use of client information followed in 2022.

Main said ACC accepted the findings and had an action plan to implement all the recommendations.

Further privacy failures nevertheless occurred.

During parliamentary scrutiny, Main was questioned about a case in which an ACC client received another person’s confidential information, including details concerning a medical appointment and psychological therapy.

Main acknowledged both human and system factors.

“It’s human error, but there’s always a system failure behind human error,” she told MPs.

On the breach itself, Main was unequivocal.

“There’s no excuse for that. That was something that shouldn’t have happened.”

Against that record, however, there is an important counterpoint.

ACC’s rehabilitation problems did not begin with Megan Main, and the final period of her leadership produced measurable improvements.

When Main announced in December 2025 that she would not seek another term, ACC board chair Jan Dawson said Main had joined the organisation at a time when its performance had been declining for many years.

“Under Megan’s leadership we are now seeing significant and sustained improvement in rehabilitation rates and financial performance,” Dawson said.

That was the board chair’s assessment, but ACC’s subsequent performance figures also showed improvement.

In January 2026, ACC introduced its Turnaround Plan in response to the independent review of its claims-management approach and rehabilitation performance, along with updated expectations from the Minister.

By the end of March, the annual growth rate of ACC’s long-term claims pool had fallen to 0.3 percent, its lowest level in a decade.

In April, the annual growth rate reached zero.

In May, it turned negative at -0.1 percent, with the pool falling to 24,647 claims.

Those improvements have continued since Main left.

ACC’s July results, released on September 25, showed the long-term claims pool had decreased 0.7 percent over the previous 12 months.

Excluding Sensitive Claims, it had fallen 4 percent.

Acting chief executive Stewart McRobie said ACC was recording “some of its best results in a decade across key rehabilitation performance areas.”

The one-year return-to-work rate improved from 92.2 percent in June to 92.4 percent in July, while ACC said its other return-to-work measures also improved.

Main has meanwhile secured her next role across the Tasman.

On August 14, the New South Wales Government’s State Insurance Regulatory Authority announced Main had been appointed its new chief executive and would begin the role on October 12.

In announcing the appointment, SIRA said Main’s tenure at ACC had seen “sustained improvement in rehabilitation rates and scheme financial performance”, as well as a greater focus on person-centred case management and experience.

Main’s tenure is therefore more complicated than either a simple success or failure narrative.

She inherited an organisation whose rehabilitation performance had already been deteriorating, presided over a period in which independent and internal reviews identified significant problems in claims management, organisational culture and accountability, and departed as several important rehabilitation indicators were finally moving in the right direction.

What is now clear is that bringing her departure forward resulted in a substantial payment in lieu of notice, alongside other costs incurred by ACC around the same period.

ACC paid Main $160,630.50 in lieu of notice after she and the board agreed she would leave months before her appointment was due to expire. The organisation also incurred legal costs and funded a previously approved governance course and travel after she had left.

Those payments do not, by themselves, establish that anything improper occurred. Payment in lieu of notice can be a standard contractual mechanism when an employment relationship ends before a notice period has been worked.

But ACC has not explained why bringing Main’s departure forward was considered preferable to allowing the remaining months of her appointment to run their course.

That is now the issue requiring clarity.

ACC should explain why the early departure was brought forward and why the resulting payment and associated costs were considered justified.

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