Gleeso: Another QBCC horror story proves costly for small business
More trouble has come to light surrounding the problematic QBCC with a small contractor stating the ‘flawed’ process has cost them $1 million.
Peter Gleeson
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More troubles at the Queensland Building and Construction Commission.
This time it’s another small contractor who can’t claw back about $1 million it is owed because they say the QBCC process is flawed.
At the heart of the problem for Civex is what they term a lack of action by the relevant Minister, Mick de Brenni.
They say they have asked for a dozen meetings with Mr De Brenni, but have had no positive response.
Civex performed civil electrical services on the Federal Government’s upgrade of Amberley Airbase in 2017, as a subcontractor.
Civex was terminated by the main contractor after they submitted a Notice of Intent to apply to the QBCC for adjudication for unpaid invoices.
Civex has been chasing what it is owed ever since, spending almost $1 million in legal fees.
Civex wrote to Mr De Brenni, saying the investigation had “failed miserably’’.
“Our first stop was the QBCC adjudication process,’’ the Civex letter said.
“We had 20 days from the day payment was due from Fredon to raise an adjudication claim. Because in Fredon’s contracts they had two conflicting reference dates, the adjudicator defaulted to legislation that says we “should” have been paid 10 days from invoice, not 30 as was in the contract and had been in action from the start.
“Which means that we only had 20 days from the 10 to submit our application rather than 20 days from 30.
“So the day that we believed Fredon were due to pay our invoices was the last day for submitting our adjudication application.
“We lost the adjudication and had to pay $15K in fees for the privilege of the QBCC adjudicator stating that we were out of time in submitting our documents so he couldn’t adjudicate.
“Nothing to do with us not being paid, legislation being breached. - a legal technical loophole that Fredon deliberately exploited to defeat our application.
“We’ve had two more applications with the QBCC on other matters and they failed us both times - so now we know to never go near the QBCC adjudication process because it is not there to help subbies. It should be disbanded.
“We put in a monies owed complaint against the contractor which went nowhere because we are in court.
“Circular conversation - they breached legislation to not pay us, QBCC failed us so we had no option but to go to court, yet once in court they cannot enforce any action regarding the legislative breach. It is a closed loop with no help for the subbie.’’