NDIS racks up $600m on consultants and outsourced staff

The NDIA has spent more than half a billion ­dollars in one year on consultants, contractors and outsourced staff, documents show.

NDIA chief executive Rob De Luca.

The agency running the National Disability Insurance Scheme has spent more than half a billion ­dollars in one financial year on consultants, contractors and outsourced staff, blowing its own projections by $130 million, new documents reveal.

The $600m torrent of cash in 2017-18 is in addition to the $4.9 billion spent on direct support for disabled people and includes almost $250m paid to the Department of Human Services for “shared” staff and IT networks that have caused at least three major system meltdowns in the past two years. More than $55m was spent by the National Disability Insurance Agency on labour hire, temporary staff and recruitment services in just one year, des­pite warnings from the Australian Government Solicitor that in doing so, it may be in breach of workplace laws.

These procurement figures do not ­include the running costs of the agency, which has about 1700 full-time and permanent staff.

The register of contracts and consultants reveals a deal to outsource the call centre to global firm Serco is worth $69.2m and not the $60m referred to by NDIA chief executive Rob De Luca at Senate estimates hearing in June.

“The figure referred to by the NDIA CEO in Senate estimates was exclusive of GST,” a spokeswoman for the NDIA told The Australian. Crisis public relations firm Newgate Communications has also been brought on for a second contract with the agency, this one worth $800,000 over seven months. Part of that contract — worth $152,400 — was paid out in the final month of the 2017-18 fin­ancial year, with the rest to be spent by the end of this year.

Newgate was notably involved in managing the media for the board of Ardent Leisure after the Dreamworld tragedy that killed four people. Newgate also represented disgraced former Melbourne mayor Robert Doyle.

Marketing agency FutureBrand has been handed a $165,000 contract relating to the NDIS’s “Brilliant Purple branding project” which, The Australian revealed yesterday, was largely borrowed from Bankwest’s “Brilliant Orange” campaign. Mr De Luca was managing director of the bank for five years before joining the disability scheme. A further $38.3m was spent on consultants — notably McKinsey Pacific Rim, Boston Consulting Group, KPMG and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu — to advise the disability agency on its botched independent pricing review, to identify problems with how housing funds are dispersed, and to help with “corporate planning”.

 

Tangent Consulting was paid $43,800 from a $166,000 contract in the financial year to hire “conversation architect” Geoff Brown as an “audiologist consultant”.

NDIA declined to say what ­services it hired Mr Brown to ­perform. The agency has outsourced more than $170m worth of work in the past financial year to non-government organisations to help develop support plans for participants of the scheme, implementing them and reviewing them if need be. This figure also includes payments to other “partners” in the community to offer Early Childhood Early Intervention services for young children who may not need ongoing support from the NDIS if services help them in their early years.

The co-chief executive of ­People with Disability Australia ­Therese Sands told The Australian the organisation was “very concerned to see the continued spending on consultants and temporary staff by the NDIA”.

“People with disability have the right to an equal and good life, with the resources to make that happen,” she said. “Instead, millions of dollars are being spent on consultants. This has to stop now.

“The staffing cap needs to be removed so the agency can build up the expertise and skills they need to make sure that the NDIS works for all people with disability who need support. We know this isn’t happening right now, partly because there aren’t enough staff with the expertise required to get planning right.”

In late August, then social services minister Dan Tehan lifted the staffing cap and announced “an additional 750 staff” would be hired over the next year, while targeted training would be provided for 6000 planners and frontline staff.

The NDIA’s staffing cap will be increased to 3138 in 2018-19 and 3230 in 2019-20, with a further increase in 2021-21 bringing the new, ongoing cap to 3400. In the federal government’s final budget update released this week, it was revealed $2.5bn less than predicted was spent on the NDIS because the scheme is delayed and people with support packages do not have a mature service market in which to spend the money. Labor’s acting social services spokesman, Doug Cameron, said the scheme had suffered because of the Coalition’s “ideological austerity”.

“Those staff caps have created chaos in the system and it was part of the austerity budget by Tony Abbott and it has not been fixed since then,” Senator Cameron told Radio FIVEaa Adelaide yesterday.

A spokeswoman for the ­NDIA said the organisation “sources a range of specialist services to ­deliver the NDIS”.

“These include actuarial and public reporting services, research and consultation, specialist disability services, and communication and publication services,” she said. “As the NDIS rolls out nationally, the NDIA has engaged a mix of ongoing and contracted NDIA staff, community partners as Local Area Co-­ordinators, as well as a small number of contracted specialist advisers and consultants.”