PO Box 87 Grange QLD 4051 | Ph: 0438947802 | Email: belinda@intrepiduslaw.com.au
17 June 2026
Committee Secretary Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit PO Box 6021 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600
Via email
Dear Committee Secretary
Submission: Inquiry into the Administration of the National Disability Insurance Scheme
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the written questions on notice arising from the public hearing of 15 May 2026. We rely largely on our submission to the Inquiry into the Integrity of the NDIS (‘Integrity submission’, Submission 57), which addresses several of these matters.
Part 1
- Compliance infrastructure
(a) Our observation that the infrastructure is insufficiently robust is consistent with the findings of the Auditor-General¹ and our own experience. The rules a person must satisfy before claiming are opaque and impractical, yet the burden of applying them sits with participants and providers. Plans commonly run to 40 or more pages, are structured inconsistently, and frequently do not state clearly what is funded; the Agency makes granular line-item decisions internally but reports them only as aggregated totals under broad headings. A participant or provider therefore cannot reliably tell, at the point of a transaction, whether a purchase is compliant, and no real-time check prevents a non-compliant claim. Honest people fail accidentally, and the Agency is left to detect non-compliance after the fact, at scale, by manual means it cannot sustain.
(b) Our recommended solutions are set out in full in our Integrity submission. In summary, if the Agency wants to take compliance quite seriously, it could:
- implement Medicare-style, point-of-sale compliance checks, verifying a claim in real time against a clear schedule of funded items – maintaining participants’ ability to spend their plans flexibly, but preventing manifestly non-compliant claims from being submitted;
¹ Auditor-General Report No. 48 2024–25, National Disability Insurance Agency’s Management of Claimant Compliance with National Disability Insurance Scheme Claim Requirements.
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redesign plans as clear budgetary instruments – retaining flexibility, but delineating which line items can and cannot be billed, at what price, and by what class of provider²;
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publish plain-English, accessible and translated guidance on claiming obligations, and create a binding mid-plan pathway to confirm whether a support is permitted³; and
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amend s 46 so claimants are only liable for non-compliance where they knowingly do not comply.⁴
- Claim rejections
(a) Where the Agency unexpectedly rejects a claim, a contract for the delivery of services often remains on foot between provider and participant. The participant’s inability to source payment through their plan may not discharge their obligation to pay for services already rendered. The cost does not disappear, it shifts unexpectedly onto the participant out-of-pocket or onto the provider as a bad debt. That is not an improvement in financial sustainability – it is a transfer of cost onto the people the Scheme exists to support, and it is most unfair where the fault lies with an unscrupulous provider, since the Scheme can recover from that provider but the participant cannot.
The link to sustainability is structural: the NDIS relies on a diverse provider base in place of direct government provision. Conduct that disincentivises providers from transacting – screening participants for capacity to absorb a rejected claim, and declining to serve self- and plan-managed participants – damages that market, and a thinner, more risk-averse market raises the cost of delivery.
(b) We recommend the same point-of-sale and plan-clarity reforms at 1(b), which would prevent most rejections. Where a claim is nonetheless denied or held on integrity grounds, the Agency should provide particularised written reasons and a right of reply, and an express internal and external appeal right should attach to every such decision.⁵
- Improper use of NDIA powers
(a) Good compliance infrastructure makes it hard to do the wrong thing and easy to do the right thing. Our concern is that, with manual claim reviews, it appears that a key part of the Scheme’s system for determining claimant and provider compliance with NDIS claim requirements is working against that goal. The lack of a review right and ability to indefinitely hold claims means that there is never a determination of compliance or non-compliance. Instead, a provider the Agency deems to be unsuitable or to have concerns about is summarily driven out of the market, on evidence that is only known internal to the Agency and is never particularised to the persons effected. The exercise of discretion in this way damages business trust in its regulator. Trust between providers and the Agency as regulator of compliance is essential for the Scheme’s financial sustainability. If providers leave the market, that damages the Scheme’s ability to provide its services, which damages its sustainability. That is a supply-side pressure which would operate to drive up the price of delivering services, or create other off-target effects where services are already being delivered at the maximum price guide rate.
² Intrepidus Law, Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS, Inquiry into the Integrity of the NDIS (24 April 2026) (‘Integrity submission’), Recommendation 2 (p 4). ³ Integrity submission, Recommendation 1 (p 3). ⁴ Integrity submission, pp 2–3 (Part 4). ⁵ Integrity submission, Recommendation 3 (p 5) and Recommendation 4 (p 5).
Part 2
- Whether legal challenges are increasing, and the most common grounds
Intrepidus Law represents participants seeking access to the Scheme and supports the Agency has refused. We have seen a marked increase in demand for our services over the past year, which corresponds with public recognition of our practice through the Queensland Law Society and Australian Human Rights Commission award programs. We have also observed longer wait times for case events before the Tribunal. These observations are anecdotal and firm-specific, so we note that the Committee may be most assisted by seeking this data from statutory officers which hold those data.
- Typical cost of a single legal dispute
We are unable to provide this information, as it is commercial-in-confidence.
- Immediate changes to reduce disputes and improve certainty
In our respectful submission, reducing disputes should not itself be the immediate goal; the volume of disputes is better understood as an indicator of whether the underlying problems are being addressed. If participants and providers receive good information, and are pointed to the evidence needed to satisfy the Agency’s tests, the need to appeal falls away. If the Agency adequately funds capacity-building supports, a participant is less likely to deteriorate to the point of needing an emergency plan reassessment.
The risk in targeting the number of disputes directly, before addressing the need that drives them, is that the need does not disappear – it is displaced into the hospital, police, child protection and other public systems, usually in a more costly form. The durable way to reduce disputes and improve certainty is to build the infrastructure described above: clear plans, point-of-sale checks, accessible guidance, proper investigatory practice, and fair appeal pathways.⁶
Yours faithfully
Belinda Kochanowska Principal Solicitor / Founder Intrepidus Law
⁶ Integrity submission, Part 5 (p 3) and Recommendation 2 (p 4).