Hot on the heels of widespread rorting by private Vocational Education and Training (VET) providers, the Federal Government has uncovered alarming levels of fraud within the family daycare sector. Fraud to the value of $60 million within the sector has already been detected, and it is expected that this amount will increase to $200 million by the time the Government’s audit of the sector is complete. From The Australian:
Almost 6000 family daycare providers have been caught in a government sting that is expected to uncover $200 million in undeclared childcare fees and illegal welfare claims by operators…
Last week, an Albury woman who operated the Aussie Giggles childcare centre in the NSW border town was sentenced to a maximum seven years’ jail in one of the country’s largest childcare fraud cases in which $3.6m was defrauded from the commonwealth.
In one case detected by the Department of Human Services, a family daycare educator operating in Victoria and receiving a Centrelink payment allegedly failed to declare $240,000 in income from fees charged for childcare over four years.
Another provider declared only $38,000 income as a family daycare educator over four years to the Department of Education, despite having brought in more than $400,000 and overclaiming $128,000 in welfare payments, according to a government audit.
In October last year, The Australian reported that shonky family day care operators had fraudulently claimed payments of close to $1 billion over the prior two years:
We now learn there has been close to $1 billion fraudulently claimed over the past two years by family daycare operators, mainly by the co-ordinators of these home-based businesses. That’s more than 7 per cent of the total amount of childcare fee subsidies paid out by the commonwealth over the same period…
It’s such a beautiful business.
Declare yourself available to care for children in your home, attend to a bit of paperwork, submit your home for inspection and claim to be working towards a Certificate III in child care.
Then start to claim the fee subsidies from the taxpayer.
What about actually looking after children? That’s not strictly necessary and, let’s face it, organising phantom children is not really very hard, particularly because a lot of family daycare operates on a cash basis…
History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. Just like the private VET rorting, government subsidies for family daycare were paid directly to providers of the services, thus enabling shonks to easily defraud the system and receive government payments without ever minding children.
