Barbara Powell – 21/09/2021

My main area of concern is changes to Self Managed funding. Currently I am plan nominee and mother of a participant. I engage services from a support agency and a private support worker for my son. His plan is totally self managed and I receive invoices from the agency which are processed through the portal. However I also pay a private support worker as an employee, I pay her wage, withhold tax, pay superannuation and workers compensation . All of the paperwork is available for auditing and payments are made to the ATO through the MyGov portal with all of the required paperwork. My sons private support worker is not a registered provider and only works for me. If the new legislation takes away my ability to self manage and NDIA resume responsibility for her payments she will have to get an ABN, be responsible for her own tax and have no superannuation. How long would she have to wait for payment ? My support worker has bills to pay and needs to have a reasonable expectation of getting paid in a timely fashion. At the moment the NDIA struggle to make timely payments yet new legislation want to put more payments into the system to slow it down even more ! Whilst I appreciate that there may be people abusing the system it is grossly unfair for every family to be penalised for the ones doing the wrong thing. This part of the legislation needs to be removed !