Let’s not blame the entire daycare industry for alleged fraud

IT would be wrong to condemn the family daycare industry as a whole over alleged fraud, as it provides an essential service in childcare area, says Tim Priest.

JUST a few days ago in southwest Sydney, a number of raids took place resulting in the arrests of a number of men for the alleged rorting of more than $27 million in childcare rebates. The alleged fraud was breathtaking in its simplicity. The two alleged ringleaders were under 30 years of age and yet managed to sail through a range of measures for people wanting to set up a Family Day Care business.

It is not clear how the brothers, Mohammad and Ibrahim Omar, got past stage one, which requires evidence of experience and expertise in the childcare sector.

The brothers at the time of the ­application would have been aged just 21 and 23 respectively.

The brothers were approved by the relevant state and federal authorities during the initial process as “fit and proper” applicants and so began a $27 million taxpayer-funded childcare business enterprise.

Along the way, one of their 600 employees was arrested at a shopping mall brandishing a large sword following an earlier altercation.

He was eventually arrested, charged and convicted.

Another employee is suspected of ties with a Syrian-based terrorist ­organisation and police are investigating whether any of the $27 million in rebates has ended up in terrorist bank accounts overseas.

An unrelated case in Melbourne in December 2015 saw the arrests of a number of Somali family members who have been charged with an ­alleged $16 million fraud on the childcare rebate system.

Those arrests followed the setting up of a federal taskforce, Operation Integrity, looking at welfare fraud.

Following those arrests I was interested in the comments of the AFP ­Assistant Commissioner in charge of the  operation  who was quoted saying: “The community should take comfort that Operation Integrity is working with its partners to detect, deter and disrupt noncompliance and welfare fraud.”

If I was able to give the assistant commissioner a little feedback, it would be that I am not comforted by the fact that massive police resources are now being poured into combating large-scale child welfare fraud.

That in 2016, in the age of unprecedented technology and innovation, the government and its agencies cannot even manage their own application processes which grant access to millions of dollars in childcare ­rebates.

If these mistakes happened in the private sector, a few senior employees would lose their jobs.

Unfortunately in the public sector, that rarely, if ever, happens.

No doubt, we as the taxpayer are being taken to the cleaners by a combination of opportunism and massive incompetence on the part of NSW and federal government departments charged with the running of the childcare scheme.

Former police officer Tim Priest.

Ibrahim and Mohammad Omar allegedly had some 600 educators in their employ.

I wonder how many, if any, of these 600 educators were inspected by the NSW Education Department which oversees the day-to-day running of family childcare operators.

It is not a coincidence these two cases arose in areas of Sydney and Melbourne that Daily Telegraph columnist Mark Latham described as welfare-dependent sinkholes.

It is about time someone, somewhere in federal or state politics had the courage to ask just how much of this nation’s social security budget is swallowed up in these “sinkholes”.

Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison should be calling on the Senate to immediately undertake a senate ­inquiry into Australia’s unsustainable welfare system. But I doubt that Labor will support measures that might affect its chances of retaining a stranglehold on seats located within the welfare sinkholes.

The Greens won’t support anything that makes sense to the average punter — they think money grows on trees and that’s why they are against tree felling.

The NSW Education Minister needs to explain to the people of NSW just what his underworked public service executives are doing about random compliance checks on family daycare providers.

More specifically, do any of the ­visits take place in the wilds of southwest Sydney?

It would be wrong to condemn the family daycare industry as a whole, as it provides an essential service in the childcare area.

The blame lies entirely with the public servants charged to run the system on behalf of the taxpayer.