RETROSPECTIVE PAYMENTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 May 1919, Page 6

RETROSPECTIVE PAYMENTS.

DEFENCE MINISTER IN REPLY. By Telegraph. —Press Association. Wellington, Last Night. Referring to an announcement in the Soldiers' Guide regarding retrospective payments, Mr D. Seymour, general secretary of the Returned Soldiers' Association, stated that the association wished to make it quite clear that the Minister still denied his responsibility in the matter of such allowances to children. While normally allowances are payable as from the date of entering camp, retrospective allowances are to be paid only from the date of embarkation.

Sir James Allen to-day made the following statement regarding Mr. Seymour's criticism: "I note that Mr. D. 6eymour in commenting on the retrospective allowances that are to be paid to wives of soldiers of the New Zealand expeditionary force, refers to the condition that the allowances are payable as from the date of embarkation as characteristic of the pettifogging effort of the Defence Department to minimise the amount rightly due to them. This criticism is quite unjustified. The condition has not been imposed because of any desire to limit the monetary payment, but to meet difficulties due to the very incomplete State of the early records of the expeditionary force camps. The records of the main body and the early reinforcements do not indicate the status of soldiers; that is, they do not indicate whether a man was in camp as a fit soldier due to embark for active service or whether he was an unfit man engaged on home service only. The evidence of active service status in the case of soldiers of the main body and early reinforcements is the fact of embarkation. That is the real reason why the condition making retrospective allowances payable as from embarkation has been imposed, as it gives the only clear and dc-fmite line of distinction between active and home service. It might possible in these cases for the pay branch to trace each man's history from the old records in order to ascertain the date when he er.tered camp, but this inquiry would entail a great amount of labor and would in many instances I>e inconclusive, and would certainly prevent retrospective grants being available in the first week in .Tune next. As a matter of fact it would delay payments for months,"