Since 2022, fraudsters taking advantage of the National Disability Insurance Service (NDIS) have been sentenced to a combined 63 years’ imprisonment, while having millions of dollars’ worth of gold, silver and cash seized.
John Dardo, deputy CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), gave the figures in response to questions from conservative-leaning One Nation leader Pauline Hanson during Senate Estimates on Oct. 29.
“How many prosecution cases for fraud been successful in the in this past, say six months?” Hanson asked, as part of the Education and Employment Legislation Committee.
Dardo told Hanson that since the NDIS Fraud Fusion Taskforce was set up in November 2022, 27 successful prosecutions had been recorded.
“So there’s a lot of cases that we’ve commenced in the last six months, that you won’t see in front of the courts for a year or two years or three years, but every single case that’s gone in front of the courts that’s come to a resolution in the last six months has had a successful resolution,” he said.
“And what I mean by that, is it’s been found in our favour, we have not lost a single case.”
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Dardo said the longest sentence handed out for NDIS fraud had been seven-and-a-half years.
Hanson further questioned whether successful prosecutions had translated to the return of public money.
“Of these 27 cases that have been prosecuted, that you have won, have you recovered taxpayers’ monies?” she said.
Dardo said there was a criminal asset confiscation taskforce, which was a Commonwealth function, and that taskforce had confiscated assets.
“In one case where a provider was … defrauding the scheme … over $5 million (US$3.5 million) of assets were confiscated from her estate,” he said.
“Another mechanism to confiscate assets, senator, is that we might use a state commission to help us seize or freeze the assets.
“So, in another case, we froze over $40 million dollars in assets just in that one case.”
Dardo said officers had also seized assets including gold and silver bullion and gold coins while acting on search warrants.
“While the prosecution number doesn’t sound big, we’ve removed over 6,000 providers from being able to claim from the system,” he said.
“Before we removed them, those providers had claimed over seven and a half billion dollars … some of that claiming might have been for partially delivered services, or services that may have been delivered to a certain standard.
“But these providers, on balance, were not fit to be in the scheme, and being able to remove 6,000 of those providers is a really big win, and needs to be seen alongside the 27 prosecutions as a complementary thing.”
Hanson asked about the country of origin of those arrested, with Dardo saying most were Australian citizens.
“But at the end of the day, the approach that we take with integrity is that we generally do not care what your country of origin is, what your birth country is,” he said.
“We don’t care how you identify at the end of the day, we assess the integrity risk.”
