Manual checking move in concessions bungle
The State Government’s troubled concessions scheme will be put up for review by parliament’s Economics and Finance Committee tomorrow as the government admits it’s reverted to manually checking claims.
The scheme has been queried by the Auditor-General for the last five years as being “unable to confirm the concessions provided by SA Water, Revenue SA and energy providers were complete and made only to eligible customers”.
InDaily revealed yesterday the results of an IT consultant’s testing of more than 174,000 concession claims.
The leaked internal report to the government department which oversees the system, the Department of Communities and Social Inclusion, estimated one in five concessions are made to ineligible householders.
In separate developments today:
- The Minister for Communities and Social Inclusion, Tony Piccolo, admitted his department had reverted to manual checking of claims.
- Shadow minister Iain Evans said he would ask the parliament’s Economics and Finance Committee to review the operation of the system.
- Piccolo said overpayments would be either written off, reclaimed from the provider or reclaimed from the householder.
Piccolo was responding on radio FiVEaa today to yesterday’s exclusive report by InDaily that an internal government review had found that 21 per cent of 174,306 concession claims on energy bills were ineligible.
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The report proposed further meetings with energy suppliers “to resolve differences in data” and proposes a similar exercise to establish the extent of the problem in other billing systems such as SA Water and councils.
“That report is now five months old,” Piccolo told FIVEaa’s Leon Byner.
“It may have been accurate at the time, but we believe its not accurate now.
“There will be some people we will find that are not eligible and some other that may have missed out.
“If the amounts are small, we might just leave it or cut it there.
“If there is a large amount we will recover that.
“Some of the costs will be borne by the provider.”
Evans said the Opposition had attempted to put the concessions system up for review last year, without success.
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“We moved to have a review of the concessions system, but the State Government voted it down,” he said.
“Tomorrow I will move again to re-raise the issue to get the committee to do a review of the process.”
More than $600 million worth of concessions paid in the last five years have been based on flawed computer systems which the Department of Communities and Social Inclusion has spent five years trying to fix – a project initiated in 2008 by then Minister for Families and Communities Jay Weatherill.
Failed attempts to fix the over-payments have attracted the ongoing attention of the Auditor-General who warned in successive annual reports that he had “again found the Department was unable to confirm that concessions provided by SA Water, Revenue SA and energy providers were complete and made only to valid eligible customers”.
On the basis of the leaked document’s estimate of 21 per cent ineligibility, the over-payments amount to $126 million over the last five years – $28.8 million in the 2012 financial year.
In July InDaily revealed the interstate company first hired to fix the database problems, Endpoint Pty Ltd, had gone into liquidation.
One of Endpoint’s former directors and one-third shareholder, Wolfgang Schumacher, revealed the extent of the “real disaster” that he said “would be an enormous catastrophe for the taxpayer” if it’s not addressed.
“It will end in disaster,” he told InDaily in an exclusive interview.
“The Concessions and Seniors Information System (CASIS) project has been hampered from the beginning because the department didn’t draw up a ‘requirements document’, so there’s nothing to measure progress against.
“It’s like going to a car yard and asking for a car, wanting a VW and then having a Bedford truck delivered.
“This project has been wandering along, out of control for some time.
“The bureaucrats keep telling the Minister there’s no problem, but there is.
“It’s been estimated by the software designers that around $50 million has been paid in concessions to ineligible recipients.”
Last financial year the DCSI administered $138 million worth of concessions for water, sewer and council rates, electricity, transport charges and various levies.
Concessions on SA Water bills totalled $35 million, council rates $32 million, energy bills $30 million, transport services $31 million and other charges $8 million.
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