The Secret Agent at every Cremation, and the results of their work.

AS IF FUNERALS ARE NOT EXPENSIVE ENOUGH ALREADY

We all know that after someone dies, you need to obtain a death certificate, and notify Births, Deaths and Marriages of their passing, and if they are going to be buried, that is about the extent of the paperwork.

Before someone is cremated, however, there is an additional step that must be performed. The Cremation must be signed off by a Medical Referee. The reason for this is that if you need to check something about a body that is buried, it is not too difficult to exhume the body and find out whatever it was you needed to know. If the body has been cremated however, that is not possible because all the evidence has gone up in smoke.

As a result, the law in New Zealand requires the additional step of obtaining the approval of a Medical Referee. The Medical Referee will, most times, not even see the deceased, but will work with information passed on to him/her by the family, doctors or undertakers that have worked with the deceased and then make their decision and sign off on the cremation.

Well, that sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? And this is where it starts getting hairy. 

The Medical Referees, by and large, keep a very low profile and very few people know about them or the services that they provide, and that is exactly how the Funeral industry likes it.

Medical Referees get paid for their services and their charges range from about $30 to $300. This is usually paid for by the undertakers on your behalf and then charged on as part of their bill, often under the moniker of “professional Service Fees”.

So how much would you expect to have to pay for an Undertakers “Professional Services”?

Charges for “Professional Service Fees” in New Zealand can range from $500 up to way over $4000 so you can see why the industry are keeping the system below the radar, it can be a license to print money; and it is not the referees that get the benefit.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some undertakers whose charges are quite reasonable and do a wonderful job for their customers. It is just unfortunate that there are not more of such people, and while the Medical Referee system is “secret” that situation is unlikely to change.

In most cases, if you were to ask your local doctor who the medical Referee for your area is, they would not know and the advice you would probably get would be to see an Undertaker. The same answer is likely if you were to ask your local Crematorium, even though they are very familiar with the system.

The organisation “Death Without Debt” was set up to bring some transparency to the process after death, and I recommend a visit to their website, https://www.deathwithoutdebt.org.nz, where there is an excerpt from the TV program “Sunday” (now defunct) and a Podcast about this subject.

Death Without Debt’s founder, Fergus Wheeler makes the point that a significant portion of the cost of after death care can be avoided by preparation and a visit to this website is a great first step. It is also worth looking for the next seminar in your area, I was amazed at what I learnt.