NDIS ICT Systems
Submission 25
Att Secretariat for Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme
Dear Sir/ Madam,
I am the Plan Nominee for a family member in the NDIS. The payments are made by a Plan Manager. We chose this because of me and the Participant being new to the NDIS, not knowing what to do and feeling nervous about the whole thing. Whilst the Participant signs off on invoices for some services, there are others where the Plan Manager pays without Participant confirmation.
In summary, we have found that the MyPlace portal is not transparent enough in our situation (ie where a Plan Manager is involved). The lack of transparency of money movements and budget status is a problem because:
Building our understanding is very difficult without being able to follow transactions along in the portal. As a Nominee, I want to support my family member to build their capacity to use the portal. However, MyPlace only shows a high level summary, not enough detail to make sense of how the transactions actually work. If we could build our knowledge about this, we could reduce our reliance on a Support Coordinator and Plan Manager. Without transparency, there is a significantly increased risk of fraud. For example, a Support Coordinator bills the Plan Manager. The Plan Manager pays. That is the NDIA arrangement with this service type - fine. But there is not even a post-payment opportunity for the Participant or Nominee to see the details to be able to assess whether they truly reflect the services received. Transparency would allow the service user to monitor and observe any discrepancies, with the ability to query anomalies. Also, to support verification, there should be detail from the Support Coordinator about each activity (eg Call to Participant; Email from Nominee; Meeting with SIL provider, etc). Maybe it’s there, but we can’t see it, or build trust in the process. (If I go to the dentist I get an intelligible, verifiable, itemized bill; my expectation from NDIS providers is the same.)
My strong recommendation is that Plan Nominees be given ‘read only’ access to the financial transaction details and budget progress in the MyPlace portal, even if they are not performing the transactions themselves. Then the people who care most, the Participant and their family member (or other Nominee), can be more proactively involved. They can help to ensure that payment mistakes have not been made, and make the NDIS a more robust system for all.