NDIS firm Support Services in integrity probe: tip-offs claim holidays on taxpayers, doctor collusion

An NDIS firm was accused of using taxpayer money to send clients and carers on holidays, offering people with disabilities cash payments instead of support, and colluding with doctors to inflate plans, court documents state.

​Maysan Holdings’ Wasfa Amoor, right, with fellow co-director Raid Sharmookh, has emphatically denied their firm has engaged in wrongdoing.

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An NDIS firm was accused of using taxpayer money to send clients and carers on holidays, offering people with disabilities cash payments instead of support, and colluding with ­doctors to inflate plans, court documents state.

The tip-offs led the National Disability Insurance Agency to begin in July last year to manually review all claims submitted by Sydney-based Maysan Holdings, trading as Support Services for NDIS and Aged Care.

Maysan director Wasfa Amoor has emphatically rejected every allegation, but the NDIA is still casting doubt on the company’s NDIS services almost a year later.

The company is now appealing against the manual review and a decision by the agency in January to reject more than 6000 of its payment claims. Among other allegations against the company is that it made dubious claims of providing services to prisoners.

The same type of manual audit is being done on unrelated disability firm Cocoon SDA Care, which was also accused of falsely claiming services to prisoners but insists it acted strictly within the rules.

NDIA intelligence operations director Ngarita Gregory-Hunt outlined the background to the Maysan – or Support Services for NDIS – case in an affidavit filed in the Federal Court and obtained by The Australian.

She said the agency obtained information suggesting Maysan “made claims for supports for participants whilst the participant was in prison”.

These included claims prisoners were supported in “accessing the community” and given “assistance with self-care”, she added.

“In my opinion, it is most unlikely such supports would have in fact been provided.”

Information also suggested Maysan made claims for helping participants with accessing the community and self-care when they were in hospital.

Those supports were also “unlikely”, she stated.

Between October 13, 2021, and July 6, 2024, the agency received 28 tip-offs about the company.

These included allegations that the company had booked holidays for participants and support workers and claimed the entire cost through NDIA plans, court documents say. Fraudulent reports from doctors were allegedly used to support applications for NDIS access for family members and to increase funding levels in plans, according to the tip-offs.

It was alleged the company misrepresented the functional capacity of participants to increase plan funding, provided insufficient support to high-needs participants and engaged in ­coercion.

Uncommonly large amounts had allegedly been charged against plans, and support workers were alleged to have supplied drugs to participants.

“The tip-offs … were of particular concern to me because they were from a range of different ­informants,” Ms Gregory-Hunt stated.

Those informants included the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, providers, NDIA staff members and members of the public, “many of whom had no apparent reason to provide information to the agency that wasn’t accurate and honest”.

The tip-offs indicated a high risk of participant harm, Ms Gregory-Hunt said. “Information in the tip-offs was corroborated to some extent through the review of a sample of participant plans who were receiving supports from this provider, to identify if any participant risk was evident.

“This review identified plans were over-utilised (meaning the plan funds would not cover the plan period), with the majority of supports being claimed.

“I formed the view there may well be integrity issues in relation to claims submitted … and that there was potential risk of harm to participants as a result of participants having insufficient funds available to provide them with the supports they require.”

Nicholas Winton, manager of the NDIA’s “scalable integrity ­responses branch”, said in a separate affidavit that as of March 31 this year, about 1900 entities and 43,000 individual claims were subject to manual payment review. His affidavit adds that the agency undertakes analysing and sampling exercises as part of its quality assurance programs.

In the 2023-24 financial year, the programs showed payment errors or anomalies of about 4.97 per cent of the monetary value of the claims sampled for that year, representing an increase from 1.23 per cent 2020-21, he said.

The NDIS will cost $48.5bn this year, meaning errors or anomalies could be $2.4bn a year.

Maysan claimed more than $17m in NDIS payments from 158 participants between June 2019 and June 2024.

On July 19, 2024, Ms Gregory-Hunt approved a request for a manual review of payments to be sent to the NDIA’s separate review team. That review team approved the manual review on July 23, and from then on the company’s payment claims were no longer automatically processed.

In January this year, the agency determined that 213 of the reviewed claims were payable and 6362 claims were not.

Mr Amoor, 40, born in Iraq, said in an affidavit in February that the company’s sole income source was the NDIS and that it was supporting about 95 participants. “The decision to place the applicant (Maysan) on a manual review system was based on 28 alleged tip-offs received by the NDIA against Maysan Holdings,” he states.

“Apparently the tip-offs are adverse to the applicant, however, the NDIA has not provided any particulars of the allegations made and has so far refused to provide particulars of the alle­gations made. The applicant strongly denies any adverse allegation made against it.”

He accused the NDIA of improperly withholding payments, saying the company had provided information substantiating all of its claims. The company employed 120 support workers and staff including administrative workers and allied health therapists.

“The information relied upon by the NDIA to approve and pay the 213 claims is no different to the information available in relation to the remaining 6362 claims,” Mr Amoor said. “The directors, including myself, have gone into debt to keep participants, continue providing NDIS services, continue to employ staff and avoid losing business and, ultimately, commercial viability.”

Maysan’s three directors, Mr Amoor, Raid Sharmookh and Hissam Ouraha are named as key personnel in NDIS registration documents filed in the Federal Court. Other Federal Court filings show authorities are continuing to review and challenge Maysan’s payment claims.

On May 5, an NDIA payments integrity official wrote to Maysan advising of further “potential anomalies” identified in the company’s claims. Prior tip-offs had led it to doubt the company had … appropriately provided services unless there was corroborating information, the letter said.

Anomalies identified “give rise to concerns as to the nature and delivery of supports provided to participants”.

Broadly, the agency was concerned the company had provided insufficient information such as invoices and case notes.

There were discrepancies between claimed hours and kilometres and rostered hours worked or travelled by corresponding support workers. In some instances rosters showed no support worker was scheduled to deliver claimed services.

Mr Amoor and Maysan did not respond to a request on Monday for ­comment.