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Protecting Every NDIS Dollar

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During this session with NDIS officials, I questioned them on their progress in tackling fraud within the scheme.

Here’s an overview of how non-compliance and fraud are being tackled:

👉 29,000 tip-offs received annually, though not all represent actual fraud, with issues ranging from accidental errors to organised crime.

👉 Thousands of Australian Business Numbers are currently placed under manual payment controls and enhanced automated screening.

👉 400 active NDIS investigations are currently being handled by the NDIS Commission and taskforce partners out of 660 total taskforce cases.

👉 25 convictions have been recorded with sentences including up to 6 years in prison. Dozens of more cases are currently in the prosecution phase or awaiting final court sentencing.

Mr Dardo stressed that regulatory oversight relies on a full spectrum of interventions from automated payment blocks to criminal prosecutions to plug integrity leaks effectively.

Every step must be taken to ensure the NDIS remains financially sustainable and accessible for Australians that genuinely depend on it.

Transcript

ACTING CHAIR: Welcome back, everybody. We are on outcome 4, and we will start our questioning with Senator Roberts.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again today. What is the amount forecast to be saved by the proposed cuts to the NDIS program?  

Mr Comley: The number in the budget is $37.8 billion over the forward estimates.  

Senator ROBERTS: Is that for four years?  

Mr Comley: Yes.  

Senator ROBERTS: Shouldn’t the priority be to stop wasting money and stop the criminals defrauding the service?  

Senator McAllister: We had quite a long conversation about this earlier in the day. To put it briefly, our priority is to stop the criminals defrauding the NDIS. The budget contains very significant investments in the capability of the agency to disrupt fraud, including continuing funding for the Fraud Fusion Taskforce that we’ve spoken about before. The point I was making earlier is that we see some savings to government when we disrupt fraud, but, historically, we’ve seen the vast majority of the money that we identify as going to bad actors returned to people with disability. So, yes, our priority, absolutely, is intervening to stop fraud—non-compliant claiming and other integrity leakage—but whether that is a source of savings to government is a different question.  

Senator ROBERTS: What is the answer to that one?  

Senator McAllister: The answer is that historically, when we have disrupted providers who are defrauding the NDIS, they are taking money from disabled people. We disrupt it. The money goes back to that person who acquires the services that they need from a legitimate provider. So it’s not a source of savings to government, but it does improve the functioning of the scheme. I’ve said it on many occasions: this scheme has to operate with integrity. Over the period that we have been in government, we have made very substantial investments to lift the capacity of the NDIA and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission to make sure that that is so. There is still more to do, and it’s why there is significant investment—further investment in the budget—that we’ve just brought through.  

Senator ROBERTS: So rather than cutting services, you’re cutting fraud?  

Senator McAllister: The reform package as a whole seeks to make sure that the scheme is sustainable. Minister Butler has talked about stopping runaway cost growth. He has talked about tackling fraud. He’s talking about reshaping markets so that they deliver good value services and quality services to people with disability. The whole package is about making the NDIS stronger and better so it is here for the long term. It’s not a choice between dealing with runaway cost growth or tackling fraud. We actually have to do both.  

Senator ROBERTS: Who are the people whose services will be cut then, if it’s not just fraud?  

Senator McAllister: I’ll ask officials to talk you through some of our expectations in terms of the approach that we are taking.  

Mr Comley: Perhaps the easiest place to draw from is the public disclosure of information and the lines there where it runs through the composition of the reductions across the forward estimates. I also note in reply to your earlier comment, Senator, that that production of documents includes—as does the budget—the savings measure on both a fiscal balance and underlying cash balance basis. I gave you the underlying cash balance. The equivalent number on fiscal balance is $38.1 billion, so they’re both around $38 billion. There are 10 aspects outlined in that production of documents.  

Ms Long: That’s correct.  

Mr Comley: I’ll hand over to Ms Long.  

Ms Long: The reforms cover a range of areas. That includes addressing fraud, compliance and integrity, but it also includes measures around eligibility and participants’ budgets. Would you like me to go across—  

Senator ROBERTS: Yes, please.  

Ms Long: As Secretary Comley said, the total impact of the reforms is $38.1 billion over the forward estimates. That can be broken down into a number of components. The first component is around strengthening guidance on what is reasonable and necessary, and that has an impact of $2.9 billion over the forward estimates.  

Senator ROBERTS: Is that tightening up on who should get it? I’m using that word ‘tightening’ constructively.  

Ms Long: It’s around what is considered reasonable and necessary and how that is applied in terms of the determination of budgets.  

Mr Comley: To be clear, that measure is for people that are in the scheme, once they’re in the scheme, on what is considered the right level of support. There are other measures Ms Long will come to that go to the question of who should be in the scheme in the first place.  

Ms Long: There’s another element around resetting social, community and civic participation and capacity building budgets, which has an impact of $13.2 billion over the forward estimates.  

Senator ROBERTS: What do you mean by that?  

Ms Long: There are two particular budget categories. The first one is the social, community and civic participation budget. That’s a type of support that is provided. Another type of support is capacity-building daily activities. Those two types of supports, through a ministerial determination, will have budgets reduced. The social and community budgets will be reduced by 50 per cent. The capacity-building daily activity budgets will be reduced by 10 per cent.  

Senator ROBERTS: What do you mean by community activity? What is the scope of that?  

Ms Long: It’s quite a broad support category. It provides supports to participants to go out and engage in the community. It might involve having a support worker take them out to engage in some form of community activity, for example.  

Mr Comley: It could be as simple as going to a park, maybe having a walk around or feeding the ducks, or it could be a sporting event. It could be a whole range of things. That’s community participation.  

Ms Long: Another element of the reforms is around commissioning plan management and support coordination, which would deliver an improvement of around $1.4 billion over the forward estimates. Also, there has been quite a lot of plan inflation that has been observed, so there are a series of reforms that are aimed at addressing that plan inflation. That includes tightening the criteria around unscheduled reassessment requests and ending plans rolling over and funds being rolled over alongside. The total impact of those reforms is $3.1 billion over the forward estimates. There are also a range of access changes, as Secretary Comley referred to. In particular, in introducing an objective test of substantially reduced functional capacity, that would look to tighten eligibility for the scheme in order to focus that back on significant and permanent disability but also to have a focus on substantially reduced functional capacity rather than disability type. That change would have an impact of $9.3 billion over the forward estimates.  

Senator ROBERTS: So it’s going to tighten and be more specific?  

Ms Long: That’s correct. There will need to be a range of consultation and engagement on how that’s applied in terms of the threshold, the definition and how that’s done in practice, but, yes, the intent is to focus in eligibility on significantly reduced functional capacity. To date, access to the scheme has commonly been done through access lists that relate to your disability type. This would mean that we would no longer need to use those access lists and instead eligibility would be focused on a substantial reduction in functional capacity. If you’d like, I could keep going through a number of the other elements of the reform package, if that’s helpful.  

Senator ROBERTS: How many more are there?  

Ms Long: There are probably a couple more that I could mention if you like. Another one that might be worth highlighting is there’s a measure for mandatory registration for high-risk providers, which is around, obviously, having registration. That would deliver savings of $0.2 billion over the forward estimates.  

Senator ROBERTS: High-risk providers?  

Ms Long: That’s correct.  

Senator ROBERTS: How do you identify high risk?  

Ms Long: I might need one of my colleagues to talk to the detail of how that will be applied.  

Ms Alisa Chambers: High-risk supports as imagined through the budget is an extension of mandatory registration that we’re moving through at the moment with supported independent living and platform providers, in the new category of advanced registration. Those high-risk supports relate to daily activities—things like catheter care or really intimate personal care—and closed settings, like respite settings, where we see really significant risk to people with disability, particularly people with significant support needs.  

Ms Long: Overall, as a result of the reforms, it’s projected that average growth in the NDIS will be 1.7 per cent over the forward estimates and five per cent over the medium term. Five per cent per annum growth for the NDIS is broadly in line with Medicare and aged-care growth rates. It also means that the scheme will remain steady at around 1.6 per cent of GDP over the medium term on the current projections that we have.  

Senator ROBERTS: I had a question about how those people whose services will be cut will be identified. It’s basically through tightening up the eligibility criteria, which is something that we’ve been talking about for a while. That’s good to see, Minister.  

ACTING CHAIR: You’ve got about another two minutes, Senator Roberts.  

Senator ROBERTS: I’ve got questions for quality and safeguards. We’ve identified several fraudsters who need to be investigated and moneys chased down. Is this where most effort should be used to seek restitution?  

Mr Comley: I think the Quality and Safeguards Commission is dealing more with participant safety. The NDIA and Mr Dardo‘s area are more in the area of fraud and misuse of funds. Mr Dardo might want to comment.  

Mr Dardo: Overwhelmingly, our focus is on preventing the money going out in the first place so we can prevent the money leaving the system when it shouldn’t be. The beauty of that is you’re not trying to chase a debt. You’re not trying to chase the money after it’s gone. That’s our overwhelming focus, and we’ve done a really, really good job in identifying problematic providers and stopping the funds leaving before they should. When the money has gone, there are different ways that we might recover it. Raising a debt might be one way. Asking the courts for reparation, like an order to repay, might be another. Another way that we’ve done it is we’ve worked with state or federal policing authorities to seize assets or freeze assets. In one recent case, we froze $5 million in assets and had them confiscated by the Commonwealth. In another case, we’ve frozen $40 million in assets. In a recent case, we’ve frozen another $4½ million to $5 million. It’s really important that we send the message that, even if the money has gone and somebody thinks they’ve gotten away with it, we will actually pursue the assets. There is another avenue that we’ve been using, which is to get the tax office to go after them from a tax perspective and raise taxes and attack the problem from that direction. Overwhelmingly, designing a system to stop the money going out in the first place is our mission, but we do have avenues to try to recover money when it gets to the serious end of fraud.  

Ms Wade: Secretary Comley mentioned that the commission’s focus with respect to fraud is firmly on the behaviour of providers in the market. In addressing that, in addition to penalty frameworks for providers, we have the registration scheme, and we’ve strengthened our approach to the registration scheme to ensure that it detects fraud in more sophisticated ways through recent reforms. As those registration groups grow, which we just spoke about, that strengthened response for fraud detection continues to be enhanced as well.  

Senator ROBERTS: It’s multipronged.  

Ms Wade: Yes, absolutely.  

Senator ROBERTS: I’ll ask my last question for this bracket. I’ve still got more when we come back. How many cases of fraud are being reported? You said that, if you took them all to court, they’d be clogged.  

Mr Dardo: The way we look at it is that it’s about stopping the integrity leakage whether it’s accidental, it’s sharp, it’s malicious or it’s organised crime. We’ve got to stop it all because any one of those vulnerabilities that are open allows money to leak out of the scheme. We get a significant number of tip-offs every year. We get 29,000 tip-offs every year. They are not all fraud. We’ve got to be really careful in assuming. They’re not all fraud. As you go up the spectrum, there are several thousand ABNs that we’ve already got some controls on through manual payment reviews, and we have been building more systems in the last few weeks that are now turning on. We will put a couple thousand more ABNs into those reviews in the next few weeks. Then you go up the spectrum a bit more, where we’ve got Fraud Fusion Taskforce investigations. There are about 660 investigations, but 400 of those related to the NDIS are either with the commission or with us—or both. Then you get to the ones that are in the prosecution phase. There are a few dozen in the prosecution phase, so they’re in front of the courts or we’ve got briefs of evidence with the CDPP to prepare them for the courts. That’s the spectrum. And it’s really important to note that there is no regulatory system in the world that thinks that every single non-compliant thing is going to end up as a prosecution. That is not the way the world works.  

Senator ROBERTS: How many convictions have there been?  

Mr Dardo: There have been 25 convictions since the Fraud Fusion Taskforce started, and those sentences have resulted, in some cases, in custodial sentences up to six years. There are more cases where there has been a guilty outcome—either pled guilty or found guilty—but they’re awaiting sentencing. We don’t control the dates of the court, so some of those have been sitting there awaiting sentencing for six months or a year. There are cases that are currently scheduled for sentencing in July. They may happen in July; they may happen in December—we don’t know. But there are more cases sitting there right now where they’ve been found guilty awaiting sentencing. 

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One Nation’s Fight to Save the NDIS

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In March this year, the Senate voted down a One Nation motion moved by Senator Hanson that sought to establish a dedicated inquiry into waste, fraud, and abuse within the NDIS.

The rampant rorting, profiteering and misconduct inside the NDIS is draining resources from Australians with genuine need and pushing the scheme toward collapse.

Billions have been siphoned away, frontline workers pulled out of hospitals and aged care, and essential services are under strain nationwide.

One Nation’s position is very clear – genuinely disabled people deserve an insurance scheme for service. The NDIS is meant to be that scheme.

Only strong oversight and honest accountability will save the NDIS and safeguard taxpayers.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: This isn’t about care—about whether or not people care about the disabled. This is about restoring sound governance. This is so that we can have disabled people getting good care. I will make One Nation’s position very, very clear: disabled people deserve an insurance scheme for service—genuinely disabled people. We also want to stop exploitation of the disabled. That’s right: stop exploitation. 

I’m going to read from the terms of reference of Senator Hanson’s motion: 

That the following matter be referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee for inquiry and report by 3 September 2026— 

nothing wrong with that. I will read item (f): 

(f) the impact of waste, fraud and abuse on NDIS participants, including the diversion of resources away from Australians with genuine need; 

I’m going to read that again: 

(f) the impact of waste, fraud and abuse on NDIS participants, including the diversion of resources away from Australians with genuine need. 

I’ll go back to the start of the terms of reference: 

(a) the scale, nature and drivers of waste, fraud and abuse within the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS); 

(b) the adequacy of existing safeguards, compliance, auditing, investigative and enforcement mechanisms to detect, prevent and respond to waste, fraud and abuse; 

My responsibility, our responsibility, is to the people of Australia—to the taxpayers of Australia and to the disabled of Australia. The third item in the terms of reference is: 

(c) qualifications of workers under the scheme; 

We know it is being rorted at the moment, with people who are not qualified. The fourth one is: 

(d) the role of National Disability Insurance Agency processes, registered and unregistered providers, intermediaries, participants, nominee arrangements and any other relevant entities or persons in contributing to or preventing waste, fraud and abuse; 

What is wrong with any one of these? Nothing. Nothing is wrong. They’re needed to protect the disabled. The fifth one is: 

(e) the financial impact of waste, fraud and abuse on the sustainability of the NDIS and on taxpayers; 

If we don’t do it, the NDIS will be heading for the largest line item by far on the budget. It’ll go out of existence under its own weight. I’ve already talked about (f). The sixth and seventh ones say: 

(f) the impact of waste, fraud and abuse on NDIS participants, including the diversion of resources away from Australians with genuine need;  

(g) distortionary impacts of increased wages and fees for service under the scheme on the labour market and other industries; 

Nurses and aged care service people are being dragged out of their professions and being put into the NDIS because of the higher wages, the distorted increased wages. This is causing problems for veterans. It is causing problems for people in hospitals and doctors’ clinics. Its causing problems for people in aged care. The eighth one is: 

(h) the impact of the scheme on the housing market and construction costs;  

That’s impacting so many more Australians. There’s a serious impact there. This is about all Australians. This is about understanding the problem, and Senator Hanson has shown yet again that she understands the guts of the problem in the whole context. Who can disagree with any of these? The ninth one is: 

(i) the appropriate scope, powers and priorities of a Royal Commission into waste, fraud and abuse within the NDIS; 

Senator Hanson said it herself just a few moments ago. She’d prefer a royal commission, but this is the first step. The tenth one is: 

(j) any legislative, administrative or governance reforms required to strengthen oversight, restore public confidence and protect the integrity of the NDIS; and 

And restore trust as Senators Bell and Whitten have just spoken about. And the last one is: 

(k) any other related matters. 

This is what it is all about. I can’t see anything there that anyone would object to if they genuinely cared for the disabled, unless they’re rattling the tin to make someone a demon. All of these work to restore trust, service, care and accountability. 

We need to go back to the start of the NDIS scheme. It was a bastard. Julia Gillard as Prime Minister needed a pre-election headline, so she cobbled up the NDIS—minimal research, minimal thought, minimal consideration. Just get that bloody headline. Then the Liberals came into power and they saw a dog with no details. But instead of canning it and sending it back to the states, they saw the vulnerabilities and they tried to stop the rorts. As a result it was overcomplicated, arbitrary and crooks kept stealing. The needy kept getting no service as a result of it being a bastard at birth thanks to the Labor party. I personally think, as a side issue, that the NDIS is best done at the state level because it restores competitive federalism and accountability. I’m in favour of sending it back to the states. 

As I said, it is out of control. As Senator Hanson, Senator Bell and Senator Whitten said, it is out of control. It will soon be the biggest line item on the budget. This is important not only for the disabled where it’s extremely important but also for the taxpayers because of the rorting and the fraud of taxpayer money. The fraud is heading into the billions. In fact, I was told in Senate estimates in an answer to one of my questions that the fraud investigation is stunned with how big the impact of fraud is. It is so big that it will eventually curtail services for people needing genuine care. It will curtail nurses, aged-care workers and other carers. It’s not just affecting disabled who need care. It’s affecting people right across Australia, even the housing market. 

Every Friday I try to do a livestream, and I start with heroes who have been active in our democracy. I want to name two heroes—Drew Pavlou and Pete Zogoulas. They have exposed the rorts. We knew about them. We’ve been raising them, but they started the community with the depth and breadth of the rorts. Ultimately, what happens when we have an abusive government—that’s what this is about. This is an abusive government abusing taxpayer money. There’s no government money. There’s only taxpayer money. There’s an abuse of taxpayer money because very few citizens stand up and hold the government accountable. So Drew Pavlou and Pete Zogoulas deserve commendation for being active participants in democracy. 

For democracy to succeed, we need active participants in democracy. What has happened in this country is we’ve had it too easy, and many citizens have fallen into passive democracy. Then, that falls into apathy, and that falls into tyranny. We saw signs of that tyranny in the way the COVID mismanagement corralled people, stomped on people and suppressed people, making them do some hideous things. And we’ve seen signs of that apathy in the way the Labor government is wanting to bring in and follow through on the former prime minister Scott Morrison’s misinformation and disinformation censorship bill. They destroyed free speech and many other freedoms and basic rights during the COVID response, and now they want to bring in censorship. That’s the essence of human progress: when we have passive democracy, it leads to apathy, and then it leads to tyranny, which, as I’ve just given you some examples, is coming in to this country. Eventually people get sick of the tyranny and they rise up, and we have anarchy. That’s the cycle throughout history: active democracy becomes passive democracy becomes apathy becomes tyranny becomes anarchy. There’s a way to avoid that, which is by having more citizens like Drew Pavlou and Pete Zogoulas. 

We need an inquiry to get the facts. The Greens, being the Greens, introduced talk of an enemy and division. Where’s the enemy? Can you see the enemy, Senator Bell? Where’s the enemy? Why do they do this? They do it because they want to create victims and make those people dependent, and that’s bloody cruel. Victims are in a permanent state of dependence. That’s no way to go through life. I do not see Senator Steele-John as someone in a wheelchair. I respect his ability. I see him as an Australian with plenty to contribute. I don’t agree with much of what he says, but at least he gives that other view. But shame on the Greens for yet again creating victimhood and dependence. It’s cruel. 

We need to clean up the NDIS for the improvement of services to the disabled. Those who really care will support this motion. And the Senate, as Senator Bell has said, is an entirely appropriate place to have this inquiry. The Senate, after all, is the house of review. Let me be very clear: One Nation wants to stop exploitation of the disabled. It wants to give the disabled confidence that they’ll be getting good service, and to do that we need to restore sound responsible governance. 

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Urgent Reforms Are Needed to Address NDIS Fraud and Inefficiencies

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During the November Senate Estimates, I raised significant concerns about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Since its inception, the NDIS has faced numerous challenges, including ineffective costing and planning, resulting in unmet needs for vulnerable individuals. The program is plagued by massive fraud and a forecasted budget cost of $90 to $100 billion.

I questioned why many direct care providers remain unpaid while fraudsters exploit the system for millions. Despite the scheme’s noble intentions, it is clear that implementation issues need urgent attention. I emphasised the need for effective measures to address these problems and ensure that every dollar benefits those who need it most.

The NDIS agency acknowledged the challenges and highlighted initiatives like the Fraud Fusion Taskforce, which aims to crack down on unscrupulous providers. I stressed the importance of fixing these systemic issues to restore public trust and ensure the scheme’s integrity.

I remain committed to advocating for a well-implemented NDIS that truly serves the needs of Australians with disabilities.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you, Chair. Thank you for appearing today. The NDIS has been a problematic program since inception. That doesn’t reflect on you guys. It is not effectively costed or thought through. At the
time, it seemed to be a headline looking for a preselection buzz for the Labor Party under Julia Gillard. The program is failing on multiple levels resulting in the needs of vulnerable people remaining unmet and other
stakeholders being ignored. There is massive fraud plus a forecast budget cost of around $90 billion to $100 billion. That is what people are telling us. Why is it that many direct care providers remain unpaid while at the same time many rorters and unscrupulous fraudsters are able to rip off the system to the tune of millions of dollars? It seems to be systematic, rife, organised ripping off. The public is being taken for a ride for billions of dollars yet some agencies pay the bare minimum to untrained carers. Some carers are not paid at all. Why is that?

Senator Ayres: I suppose, Senator Roberts, the first thing to do is to respond to the initial set of assertions. Of course, you will be unsurprised to learn that’s not the government’s view at all about the value of the scheme for Australians. There are many families in Queensland who rely upon—

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, that’s not what my questions—

CHAIR: Senator Roberts. Senator Ayres, continue your answer. I will listen carefully if there is a point of order.

Senator ROBERTS: I did not say the scheme was not worthy.

Senator Ayres: They rely upon the scheme and whose lives have been changed fundamentally by the scheme. The government supports the scheme. We support it because it improves the lives of people who have a disability, particularly children who have a disability. It improves the lives of families of people who look after those people. It has a demonstrably positive effect in communities. It is often not just families who look after and support people with a disability; it’s communities. We want to see workers in the disability sector paid more, paid fairly and firms engage on an ethical basis in the activities around the scheme. Almost all of them are. We want to see productivity in a real sense—that is, more and better quality services offered to Australians who are participants in the scheme. We have committed to the scheme growing, in cooperation with the state and territory governments, at eight per cent per year. That is more than the increases in inflation. We anticipate—we traversed some of these issues in the committee—that there are other sources of growth beyond just what happens in terms of the broader inflationary impact. So that is an eight per cent commitment to growth of the scheme. It is completely legitimate for government and, indeed, members of this committee to be focused upon value for money questions, compliance questions and constantly improving the focus of the governance of the scheme to deliver better outcomes. You are right to point to some of the compliance challenges that the scheme and the government must deal with. That is very much the focus of the minister. I just doesn’t think it’s fair to denigrate the overall scheme or its value for Australians. What you do is a matter for you. It is certainly the government’s position that this is a scheme that is in the interests of Australians, in the interests of disabled Australians and in the national interest.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for that, Senator Ayres. The NDIS is a scheme that is needed. It’s very badly implemented. I am asking the people at the table what they are doing to fix it, because I believe they can fix it. I deny your assertions that I am against it. I wonder why you need to make assertions like that, because it just detracts from my answering time.

Senator Ayres: You were the one who started with the preamble, Senator Roberts.

Senator ROBERTS: I will ask the question: why is it that many direct care providers remain unpaid while at the same time many rorters and unscrupulous fraudsters are able to rip off the system to the tune of billions of
dollars? What is the core problem?

Mr McNaughton: We agree that what we would like to see—we see it in the majority of cases—is very good support providers providing the necessary disability supports to people who need those supports. That’s what makes this scheme such a very important scheme in the landscape of the country. I will ask Ms McKay in a moment to talk through some of the work that government has invested into the Fraud Fusion Taskforce and the crackdown on fraud. We know that there is—

Senator ROBERTS: Excuse me. Is that one of your big initiatives?

Mr McNaughton: It is a big initiative.

Senator ROBERTS: That is pretty important in the scheme of things?

Mr McNaughton: It is very important. I will hand over to Ms McKay to talk that through. That is around cracking down on those unscrupulous providers who are doing the wrong thing by participants. We want to
eradicate that from the scheme because we want to make sure that every dollar is going to a person with disability who requires it. I will hand to Ms McKay, who will talk through those initiatives.

Ms McKay: I want to talk about the Fraud Fusion Taskforce as well as other initiatives that the agency is undertaking to ensure, first and foremost, the safety and continuity of services for participants and to ensure that
the integrity of this scheme remains as strong and robust as we can ensure it can be.

Senator ROBERTS: Excuse me, Ms McKay. The integrity of the scheme would be essential for the other prerequisites—the safety and continuity of services—right?

Ms McKay: Absolutely.

Senator ROBERTS: I’m with you.

Ms McKay: I will talk firstly about the Fraud Fusion Taskforce. The Fraud Fusion Taskforce was established in November 2022 with an initial investment of $126.3 million over four years. An additional investment was made for Services Australia of $26.5 million, which brings the total investment to $152.8 million. The Fraud Fusion Taskforce is co-led by the NDIA and Services Australia. It has 19 other members, which are other government bodies. The Fraud Fusion Taskforce is focused on—

Senator ROBERTS: Excuse me. Does it have any law enforcement agencies as member?

Mr McNaughton: The Australian Federal Police are on it.

Ms McKay: I apologise. I am using the captions. Sometimes I am a bit delayed in my response or understanding of your questions. As Scott mentioned, enforcement agencies are part of the process. There are 95
active fraud operations being led. We’ve got over 500 active investigations currently underway with many cases there. That is one tranche of what the agency is doing. It is working across government to ensure that fraud and organised crime are dealt with in an absolute way that shows no tolerance for those behaviours within the scheme. The second tranche of initiatives that we’re doing is uplifting our system capability through a crackdown on a fraud systems uplift approach. The government has invested $83.9 million for the 2024 calendar year to focus on that work. That work absolutely complements the work of the Fraud Fusion Taskforce by ensuring that we can implement new systems that have the uplift capability we need to make sure that it’s easier to get things right and harder to get things wrong. The types of programs that we have been investing in include identity proofing systems; improving systems that check payment claims; making sure that our new IT systems are connected; and making sure that we have a fraud case management approach. I have a whole program of work that is being undertaken as part of that process. We’re also ensuring that the work we do in relation to this is co-designed and discussed with participants as well as with the sector more generally. This is so that, as we make changes to our systems, participants can have confidence that they’ve been consulted on the changes and they are going to have their safety first and foremost and continuity of care always as principles that will govern those changes that we introduce.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you very much. That was clear and succinct.

Ms Glanville: We are also a member of the taskforce. I can perhaps give you a sense of the regulatory actions that connect to that. That would be quite useful. I will quote from our 2023-24 end of financial year figures. This is in the context of there being terrific providers out there doing great work with people with disabilities and supporting them to live the ordinary lives that they require, as recognised in the Every Australian Counts
campaign from all those years ago.

Senator ROBERTS: That’s important. The good ones at the moment are being drowned out by a focus on the unscrupulous ones.

Ms Glanville: There are many good providers out there, so I agree with you that it is important to recognise them. I will give you some quick figures. The regulatory chill is that we have banning orders. There were 142 in the 2023-24 financial year. Civil penalties—

Senator ROBERTS: What is a banning order?

Ms Glanville: When someone is not allowed to provide services into the future. Civil penalties proceedings might be before courts. There were three of them. There are, of course, some other matters that I can’t talk about here but which are before the Federal Court in terms of practices and behaviours that we would find unacceptable.

Senator ROBERTS: Criminal activities?

Ms Glanville: Sometimes these can involve criminal activities, yes. There were 52 compliance notices. That is where a provider is asked to comply in certain ways with certain code of conduct or other matters. That is a significant power we have. Of course, education remains very important. We did over 21,985 sessions that relate to that. There were five enforceable undertakings and 147 infringement notices. The number refused
registration—I think this goes to the core of some of the issues are you raising—is 11,952.

Senator ROBERTS: So 11,952 registrations were refused?

Ms Glanville: Where there was a refusal of registration, yes.

Senator ROBERTS: Is that for providers or agencies?

Ms Glanville: That’s for providers, people providing services.

Senator ROBERTS: What about agencies? How many of them have been prohibited?

Ms Glanville: I can’t make that distinction, but I’m happy to take that away and see if we can get any information for you on that.

Senator ROBERTS: If you could, please.

Ms Glanville: Revocation of registration was 192. Suspended registration was 12. Warning letters was 3½ thousand-odd. That gives you a sense of about 38,000 different types of enforcement actions that we took and the outcomes of those. This is in the service of trying to lift the quality overall to ensure that people with disability have the opportunity to make good choices in terms of who provides services to them. It also ensures that we have a strong regulator where the sorts of concerns that you are raising in some of your questioning can be addressed very thoroughly by the commission and others.

Senator ROBERTS: I would like to know on notice the agencies that you have taken on. I understand that there are some very good providers and there are some unscrupulous providers. There are some very good
agencies and there are some unscrupulous agencies. The agencies that are unscrupulous magnify the problem because there is not just one or two people in those agencies. There are sometimes many people in those agencies.

Ms Glanville: We’ll certainly take that on notice and come back to you.

Senator ROBERTS: I will cede the call there because I’ve had my 10 minutes. I would like to come back and drill into some of the details.

CHAIR: I will put you on the list, Senator Roberts, for a crossbench rotation.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you

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