Australian Government Vows to Stamp Out $1.5 Billion in Disability Scheme Rip-Offs

If no action is taken, the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme will grow to $8.8 billion passed budget expectations. (Steve Buissinne/Pixabay)

Australian government minister Bill Shorten has vowed to put an end to the fraud that is hurting the federal government’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which results more than $1.5 billion (US$1.06 billion) in loss a year.

The announcement comes after a report by The Herald Sun on Sunday revealed that criminal syndicates are targeting NDIS, obtaining Australians’ personal information to produce false invoices, inflated bills, and ghost payments. The Australian Crime and Intelligence Commission has said that as much as 5 percent of the $29 billion (US$20.54 billion) scheme has been lost to fraud.

Speaking to the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, Shorten said that these are “the same people in organised crime who were taking money out of the family day care scheme.”

“There is very few things more despicable in life than crooks taking money which is due to go to disabled people,” he said.

“I absolutely want to see all options on the table to make sure we protect taxpayer money,” Shorten added, describing the NDIS as “the only lifeboat in the ocean for Australians who live with disability.”

The NDIS, which was introduced in 2013 by then-Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, now covers the support services for 580,000 Australians and is predicted by the National Disability Insurance Agency to look after 860,000 people by 2030.

Initially, the program cost $22 billion annually, but is now projected to cost $59 billion by 2029-30.

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Shorten, who is the new minister for NDIS, told The Australian that he wants to restrain the spiralling cost trajectory of the NDIS, but also hopes that more Australians will be covered by the scheme.

But Terry Barnes, a former senior adviser to the two federal health ministers under coalition Prime Minister John Howard, warned that it’s impossible for the federal government to “give all wishes” when it comes to any healthcare funding.

“It’s always, ‘We can spend a billion here, a billion there‘, or ’We can do this, we can do that',” he told The Epoch Times on April 22. “It does not really look at the totality of our health care. We do not take a holistic look at it.”

Barnes said part of the problem is that the voting public has become accustomed to seeing healthcare in “terms of quantity, not quality,” and that political parties were reluctant to engage in tough debates on the issue.

“To have a discussion about that implies blame and responsibility, and nobody really wants to go down that path,” he said.

Despite NDIS now costing taxpayers more than Medicare, Prime Minister Scott Morrison maintained during the People’s Forum debate on April 20 that NDIS was “worth investing in.”

“Because every single person who has a disability is different … you need to tailor the programs to each and every single individual,” the former prime minister said.

But the center-right Coalition government did introduce reforms to streamline NDIS in its efforts to make it more financially sustainable.

The program, while assisting disabled individuals, was being criticised for design flaws that exacerbated its cost, including uncapped funding grants, a widening list of disabilities including mental health issues, and a vast scope of services including access to sex worker services for disabled individuals.

Shorten is now accusing the previous government of creating “a maze of red tape and waste” and an “administrative nightmare” in its streamlining efforts.

“But they left the welcome mat at the back door, and I don’t think there has been enough to detect and apprehend to stop fraud both in a systems sense and chasing down individual crooks and syndicates.”

Daniel Y. Teng contributed to this report.