IRO : When Non-Compliance Becomes Harm and how the Workers Compensation System Failed to Protect Me - January 2021

“This is why it’s so important that organizations lead with compassion and empathy — particularly in times when so many are struggling.” Katharine Manning.

There is a moment when you realise the system meant to protect you is no longer failing quietly — it is actively causing harm.

For me, that moment came after months of trying to recover from a work-related psychological injury while being left exposed, unsupported, and disbelieved by the very structures meant to ensure safety.

My workers compensation claim commenced on 22 May 2020. What followed was not recovery support, but a cascade of non-compliance, silence, and institutional avoidance that compounded my injury and is ultimately costing me everything I worked honourably for in my entire life. 

I have to speak up publicly now, until the regulators are held accountable to act. I have been fighting to save my life, my livelihood, my health and to STOP THE THEFT OF MY WAGE AND ENTITLEMENTS. 

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A Claim Without a Case Manager

A workers compensation claim without a case manager is not an inconvenience.

It is a structural failure.

From around July 2020, after my assigned case worker left, I was never allocated a replacement. For months, there was no single person responsible for coordinating my claim, ensuring compliance with the legislation, or safeguarding my health and wellbeing. (See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/06/injury-management-plan-legally-binding.html). 

This absence mattered.

Without a case manager:

• there was no clear communication pathway;

• no coordination with my treating psychologist or GP;

• no return-to-work planning;

• no accountability when deadlines were missed or obligations ignored.

During this period, I was still being harassed by certain HR and WHS staff — the very conduct that had contributed to my injury. The insurer did nothing to intervene or protect me, despite their statutory obligations to do so.

When I later asked, repeatedly and in writing, why no replacement case worker had been assigned, the insurer described it as an “oversight.” But an oversight that lasts months and years, during an active claim, while an injured worker deteriorates, is not an oversight.

It is systemic neglect.

As I wrote in response via WIRO on 4 February 2021:

“Why wasn’t I assigned a case worker from around July 2020? If this was an ‘oversight’ too, there are too many important oversights from the insurer. I need all of their responses in writing.”

That request was ignored.

A phone call was offered instead — a familiar pattern of avoiding written accountability.

I demanded answers in writing via IRO later that year. I’d had enough of the bullshit.

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When Oversight Becomes Absence

On 13 January 2021, I submitted a formal complaint to WIRO (now Independent Review Office - IRO), detailing the insurer’s non-compliance.

My claim had been active for eight months. By then, the damage was already extensive.

I documented that the insurer had been uncooperative and non-compliant with workers compensation regulations from the outset. Instead of collaborating to support recovery and a safe return to work, their negligence created serious risks to my safety and wellbeing.

There was no transparency. No coordinated process. No effective oversight.

While injured, I remained exposed to ongoing harassment by certain HR and WHS senior executive staff. My privacy was violated. My medical information was mishandled. Requests for protection and intervention were ignored.

Rather than reducing harm, the system allowed it to escalate.

The absence of effective oversight meant:

• harassment continued unchecked;

• IMEs were scheduled despite existing medical evidence and without clear justification;

• I was left to navigate a complex legal and medical system alone, while unwell;

• critical decisions were made without my involvement or informed consent.

Oversight bodies exist to intervene when insurers fail to comply. But when oversight becomes passive, procedural, or overly deferential, it ceases to function as protection.

What I experienced was not oversight.

It was institutional absence.

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Why I Am Speaking Up

I did not speak up because I wanted conflict.

I spoke up because silence was no longer safe.

I’d been an information manager and academic librarian for 18 years. I love my work. My health professionals supported my capacity to return to work with appropriate safeguards. Returning to my work was critical to my recovery.

Both the insurer and the employer had legal obligations to cooperate with me and my treating professionals, including implementing a compliant return-to-work plan and engaging a rehabilitation provider.

Instead:

• I was deliberately isolated;

• forced to exhaust all personal, annual, and long-service leave, accrued in almost two decades of excellent service, while the harassment by the primary cause of my claim continued;

• subjected to further IMEs while already distressed;

• and ultimately humiliated and shamed with the unlawful outcome of adverse action that was the goal from the start, with procedural clauses used as pretext rather than protection.

Evidence later showed that the leave I was forced to use was being actively counted down by the primary cause of my claim, the person that both employer and insurer had a legal obligation to protect me from: the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY, Rena Christmann. 

Everyone left me, and even my family, in the hands of this offender. Everyone let her achieve that diabolical and completely illegal outcome. It’s the VC and governance who are ultimately responsible.

This is why I am speaking up.

Because when systems fail quietly, harm multiplies.

Because injured workers should not have to fight for written answers while unwell.

Because oversight that tolerates avoidance enables abuse.

This is not just about one claim.

It is about what happens when compliance and statutory obligations become optional (THEY ARE NOT OPTIONAL - THEY ARE MANDATORY), when phone calls replace written accountability, and when injured workers are left to absorb the consequences of institutional failure.

Listening is not a courtesy. Oversight is not symbolic.

And safety cannot depend on how much endurance an injured worker has left.

(Documents 142 and 146).

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Manning, K. (2021, 30 August). ‘What is institutional betrayal and how to overcome it.’ Psychcentral. https://psychcentral.com/health/empathy-at-work-institutional-betrayal#definition-and-examples