NDIS reaches ‘mission critical’ as launch nears

The $22bn NDIS is in “mission critical” status a month out from its full launch, plagued by a staffing shortage.

The $22 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme is in “mission critical” status a month out from its full launch, plagued by a critical staffing shortage, an inability to approve service providers and a lack of data preventing managers from finding participants.

Explosive documents leaked from a secret internal planning committee reveal the NDIS agency’s bosses have branded the rollout woefully underdeveloped, as staff battle red tape and late policy developments while preparing to begin a dramatic escalation in client numbers from 30,000 to 460,000. They also reveal the agency considered changing the definitions for success in signing up providers, as it battled to meet planned quotas.

A list of overdue decisions and completed tasks compiled for the National Disability Insurance Agency’s “transition and change committee”, obtained by The Weekend Australian, reveals the growing sense of crisis that agency bosses have denied for months. The staffing situation is so dire the secret committee “monitored whether the agency should apply to Treasury to be ­exempted from the average staffing level (full-time equivalent) workforce cap given its significant impact on agency that is in the build phase”.

The Weekend Australian understands this request did not eventuate and that there have been other pressing delays.

One of the biggest concerns, according to the agency, was work being held up in the Department of Social Services on a “phasing” rule that states how many people gain access to the scheme, when they get access and where. In February, the agency listed as overdue the need to “discuss work under way to finalise the phasing rule and amend the risk register to include risks that may flow from delays, including risks that undermine the agency’s data needs”. In April, the agency was warning that failure to have signed phasing “rules” would ­result in “access decisions (not being) made”.

On April 12, the document was updated to say: “If the phasing rule goes past next Monday, it will be mission critical.”

The rule was not finalised until about April 29, almost a fortnight beyond the “critical” deadline.

Another requirement of the agency, to have service providers registered with the scheme, was causing severe headaches in March, when the committee ­declared it would “need 15 to 60 people working every day to clear backlog by March deadline”.

But these staff did not begin until two months later, according to a later update that said: “From Monday (May 9) 40 to 50 planners will be helping get through the backlog of registrations. The definition of success in provider registrations is something that we may need to reconsider.”

Some of the data the agency needed to work on this issue was not relinquished readily by the Victorian government so the NDIS updated the risk register to say: “Need to check with Legal on whether we can use s. 55 to get info from Victoria.

Victoria is concerned about potential breaches of their Privacy Act.”

That part of the NDIS Act ­allows the scheme to gather information from people other than scheme participants in the course of doing their work.

Staffing issues were deemed critical, both in the race to hire enough workers internally and among the outsourced local area co-ordinators, who declared they would be “short-staffed” in the “early months”.

A spokeswoman for the NDIS agency said although the project was “big” it was not behind schedule. “The agency is strongly positioned to deliver the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the biggest social and economic reform in Australia since Medicare,” she said.

“Already the agency has successfully delivered the scheme for 25,000 Australians with disability and their families, demonstrating our capacity to deliver on what we do not deny is a big task.

“As planned, we have put in place a raft of arrangements to support the successful roll out of the NDIS nationally from 1 July as we transition from trial to full scheme over the next three years.”