NDIS Fraud: The Ten Worst Cases and Who Caught Them

Transcript of the published episode, checked against the episode script. Figures are written as numbers. Spot an error? Email auditthismedia@gmail.com.

00:00 Four dollars in every thousand

If you’ve paid tax in this country at any time in the last 12 years, a piece of it has been set aside for one thing.

In 2014, the Medicare levy went up by half a percentage point. That half a point was for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Earn $100,000 a year, and that’s $500 of yours. Every year.

And it was never going to be enough. When it was announced, the levy rise was expected to cover about 40 per cent of the scheme. The rest comes out of everything else you pay.

Last financial year, the scheme paid out $51.5 billion. That’s about $1,800 for every person in Australia. Every man, woman and child.

It’s $5.9 million an hour. Every hour. Day and night. All year.

So here’s a fair question. When somebody sends in a bill for that money, does anyone check it?

In 2025, the Auditor-General went and found out. Before paying, the agency’s staff checked about 0.4 per cent of the money by hand.

Four dollars in every thousand. And of the money they did check, more than half was cancelled.

Now, be fair to that number. Those checks weren’t random. The agency picked claims that already looked risky. So nobody can take that half and spread it across the whole scheme.

But you can ask what happens to the other $996.

No person looks at it. It gets paid. The Auditor-General’s verdict on the scheme’s first ten years, in its own words.

“Prior to 2024, the NDIS lacked basic prevention controls for fraud and non compliance.”

Basic, the auditors said, meant things like clear rules for what a claim had to show. Checking who was making it. And checking it before it was paid.

The agency had already described its own controls, in words it chose itself.

01:46 Who walked through

“Catastrophically weak.”

So who walked through? Two people in Sydney who didn’t need to know a single participant. They typed random combinations of numbers into the agency’s provider portal, until strangers’ disability budgets came up. 68 of them. $1.5 million.

On the evidence put before the court, one day $59,000 landed. The next day, $83,000 went on a Porsche.

In court, a statement from a carer was read out. After the money came out of her son’s plan, she couldn’t pay for his nappies.

A man who worked for the agency itself. With a provider, he put in claims worth more than $700,000, against plans he was managing, for services that never happened.

His sentence lets him out after five months, if he’s of good behaviour.

A syndicate in Western Sydney that, the federal police say, used false medical reports to get funding for people who didn’t have a disability. When police moved in, they seized eight kilos of gold bullion from a vault.

And a provider in Sydney whose own former staff were telling participants something was wrong. Her lawyers called that defamatory. The claims kept going for almost another year. The government says her sentence is the heaviest ever imposed for an NDIS crime.

Those are the ones who got caught. Later in this episode, we’ll count down the ten worst.

Add up the money on the record for all ten. About $14 million.

The scheme pays that out in less than two and a half hours.

The agency’s own estimate of what leaked out last year, through fraud, mistakes and broken rules, is about $3.7 billion. That’s $10 million a day.

So this isn’t really a story about crooks. The crooks are just the ones who noticed first.

It’s a story about how Australia built a scheme that now costs $50 billion a year, without a lock on the door.

03:33 The promise

It was supposed to be simple. In 2011, the Productivity Commission designed it. An insurance scheme, like Medicare, that would cover every Australian against the risk of significant disability.

About 410,000 people would get funded support. At full size, it would cost under $14 billion a year.

The Commission said the benefits were so large that the scheme would pass a cost benefit test, easily.

Two years later the law went through, with both sides behind it. One of the campaigners, Rhonda Galbally, later said the Opposition Leader had told her he was normally Mister No. On this one, he was Mister Yes.

13 years on, the scheme supports 782,000 people. And it paid out more than $51 billion last year.

Nearly twice the people. Nearly four times the money. That’s before inflation.

And here’s the part that gets left out. Four years in, the Commission went back and checked the books. It said the scheme was broadly on track.

But largely because a lot of the money put into people’s plans wasn’t being spent.

Two years after that, the unspent money did something else. In 2019, a $4.6 billion underspend in the scheme helped bring the federal budget almost back to balance.

The minister at the time, Stuart Robert, said no participant had received less money. Labor’s Bill Shorten called it “a national shame”.

So what happened when the money was spent?

1 July 2013. The scheme opens in a handful of trial sites. The Hunter, in New South Wales. The Barwon region, in Victoria. Young children in South Australia. Young people in Tasmania.

05:19 Day one

A year later, 7,285 people have a plan. The model is simple. A participant gets a plan and a budget. They choose a provider. The provider delivers a service, sends in a claim, and gets paid.

In 2016, it starts rolling out across the country. Here’s what that looked like from the other side. For its first five years, the scheme had no national regulator watching the people being paid. The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, the body that registers providers, takes complaints and bans people, opened in July 2018. In two states.

In Western Australia, it didn’t start until December 2020. And for a while, none of that seemed to matter.

In 2017, the Productivity Commission reviewed the costs. Its estimate of the full cost had gone up, by about $8.9 billion. Almost three quarters of that was one thing. A Fair Work decision in 2012 that gave community sector workers a pay rise.

In other words, most of that increase was the people doing the care getting paid more. That’s not a blowout. It’s a pay rise.

In 2019, the scheme’s own actuary made a forecast. By 2030, it said, the scheme would cost $46.5 billion a year.

In 2020, the rollout was finished. Seven years after day one. That year, the scheme paid out just under $18 billion.

Then it took off. For five years straight, under both sides of politics, the scheme grew by more than 18 per cent a year. By 2022, by the government’s own figures, costs were growing at 22 per cent a year.

By the year to June 2025, the scheme cost $46.3 billion. The number the actuary had forecast for 2030.

07:19 The front door

Five years early. Nobody was on the door.

To understand why it grew, go back to what the Productivity Commission designed.

It was insurance. And insurance has a front door. You get in if you meet the test. The scheme was for people with significant and permanent disability. And for children who’d get help early, so that, in many cases, they’d need less of it later.

Here’s what happened to the door. As the scheme rolled out, the states handed over their disability services. And outside the scheme, a lot of the other help thinned out. Mark Butler, the cabinet minister now responsible for the scheme, later called it, for families of young children, “the only port in the storm”.

In his telling, if you had a child who was missing milestones, there was one way in. A diagnosis.

So families went and got one. And they came in.

And this is the part to hold onto, because nobody in this story is angrier about it than the families. In Butler’s words, “It’s not the parents’ fault.”

They were desperate, he said, to get their children diagnosed, “because we’ve made it the only way they can get help.”

By last year, he said, one in every six boys in a grade two classroom was on the NDIS. In the Hunter region, where it all began, one in five. In the mid north of New South Wales, one in four.

Two years earlier, the minister at the time, Bill Shorten, had already said it out loud. “Almost half of participants in the scheme are children. None of the actuaries saw that coming.”

Then look at what the scheme paid for. On average, Butler said, a young participant with moderate needs was receiving more than 70 therapy sessions a year. He said there was no evidence he was aware of to support taking children away from learning for that much therapy. Medicare, he said, would assess a regimen like that before funding it.

Then there were the budgets. In Butler’s words, one in five plans gets an unscheduled reassessment every year. And the average result is a 20 per cent increase.

For participants who’d joined before 2020, total budgets and payments went up between 9 and 19 per cent a year, three years running.

And one kind of support grew faster than almost anything. Social and community participation. Support workers taking people out. In April, Butler put a number on it. “Five years ago, this stream of support alone cost $4 billion per year. This year, it’s more than $12 billion.”

And he gave one picture of where some of it was going. “We’ve received reports of participants falling out of their wheelchair while a support worker is scrolling on their phone.”

In 2020, the government of the day tried to put a test on the door. Independent assessments. Everyone assessed the same way. In July 2021, after a fierce campaign by the disability community, ministers killed it.

Nobody had to cheat for any of this to happen.

10:00 Who got paid

It’s what an open door does.

So who got paid? In the three months to June this year, 280,258 providers were paid by the scheme.

280,000 providers. In one quarter. Now listen to how many of them the regulator actually has on its books.

A year earlier, the Auditor-General counted. 254,000 unregistered providers. 16,000 registered.

15 in every 16 providers being paid were not registered with the regulator. And they took 42 per cent of the money paid through plan managers.

An unregistered provider can still be paid. For most services, that’s allowed. It just means they never go through the regulator’s registration audit. In the Auditor-General’s words, the regulator “does not have full visibility of the market it regulates”.

Butler put it more simply. “Under the market set up by the Coalition, you need more ID to get into a licensed club than to be an NDIS provider.”

Then there’s who moves the money. Only 7 per cent of participants have their funding fully managed by the agency. Two thirds use a private plan manager, a business that pays the invoices on their behalf.

The agency pays. But for most participants, it isn’t the one reading the invoices.

Then there’s the price. The agency doesn’t set prices. It sets price limits. The most a provider is allowed to charge.

The scheme’s own independent review found what happened to those limits. They stopped being a ceiling. They became the price. 82 per cent of the money was being charged at, or near, the maximum.

And providers didn’t hide it. 83 per cent told an agency survey they always charged the maximum.

One participant told the review: “an able bodied person can go to an allied health professional and be charged $90, but I go for the same service and because I am NDIS funded I get charged more than $200.”

If you’ve ever paid a physio out of your own pocket, sit with that one.

Last year, the agency admitted it. Some of its therapy price limits, in its own words, were “exceeding” ordinary market rates “by up to 68 per cent”.

Up to 68 per cent. On your money. Then the agency cut some of those limits. And the share of claims made at the maximum price went up. From 66 per cent to 69.

And when officials were asked at a parliamentary inquiry this year what the most common rule breaking was, two answers came up. Services that were claimed but never delivered.

12:25 The ten worst

And weekday work, billed at weekend rates.

So who actually got caught? Here are the ten worst convicted NDIS fraud cases on the public record.

Not the ten biggest. The ten worst. We’ve ranked them on how much they took, who they hurt, whose trust they broke, what they did when someone noticed, and what the court made of it.

Ten is the least bad of them. One is the worst.

12:45 Number 10

Number ten. A young man in Bendigo with a mowing business. A real business, doing real work. Then he logged in to the agency’s portal and started billing strangers’ plans. 24 of them, some of them interstate.

More than 1,000 hours of yard work for one participant, over eight months. By our count, that’s nearly 30 hours a week. For one person’s yard. More than 1,200 hours for another, over the same months.

The court heard none of the participants had asked for any of it.

$340,000 paid out, and he tried for another $150,000. On the agency’s own average, that’s a year of support for five participants.

The judge told him, “You knew what you were doing was wrong.”

Then he paid back every dollar, before he was sentenced. He’s the only one on this list who did.

13:33 Number 9

He still went to jail. Number nine. Angelina Deliciso. This one started with tip-offs. From participants.

Investigators found eight companies registered as NDIS providers. Seven of them were using business details stolen from real companies. They were registered anyway.

She wasn’t convicted of the fraud. She pleaded guilty to dealing with more than $1 million of the proceeds, from a network the agency said was linked to millions of dollars in false claims.

She didn’t go to jail. Her sentence was served in the community. One other man the agency named received $31,000 of the false claims, and moved it through bank accounts. His sentence was served in the community too.

The raids were in April 2021. She was sentenced four and a half years later.

And on the public record, nobody who set up those eight companies has ever been named.

14:27 Number 8

She’s at number nine because of what she was convicted of. Not because of what that network did.

Number eight. James Davies. 35. The agency says that in 2020 he worked for the agency itself, in Melbourne. Part of his job was managing participants’ plans.

Between April and May that year, together with a former registered provider, he submitted claims worth more than $700,000 for services that were never provided. Against the plans he was managing.

On trust alone, he’d be near the top of this list. He wasn’t trying to get past the door. He was standing in it.

So why number eight? Because the public record says almost nothing else. Not how much was actually paid out. Not how many participants were hurt. The agency says only that it supported the ones who were.

The agency started investigating shortly after. It took six years to reach sentencing.

When he was jailed, the minister for the NDIS, Jenny McAllister, said this. “Anyone who abuses their position at the NDIA, or in any Government agency, will be identified, investigated and prosecuted.”

He was. Two years and eight months, to be released after five, if he’s of good behaviour.

15:39 Number 7

Five months out of 32. By our count, the smallest share of anyone jailed on this list.

Number seven. A registered provider in Melbourne. The first case the new fraud taskforce ever sent to prosecutors.

Between June and August 2018, he got into the accounts of 230 participants. Then he sent the scheme 392 claims for services he never provided.

And he barely hid it. As the court heard, he used his own company and his own bank account. The scheme paid him anyway. More than $370,000.

On the agency’s own account, more than 200 participants had their ongoing support hit. Families told the court they went without.

Meanwhile, police seized a BMW limousine and a Hilux. The court heard he’d spent $14,000 at Louis Vuitton in under two weeks. The judge said he was motivated by “personal enrichment in the form of luxury goods”.

16:33 Number 6

Four years. About half the money came back, through selling his assets.

Number six. A woman in Sydney’s north west, with a cleaning business. Her customers were NDIS participants. People who needed help at home.

Between 2018 and 2020, she put in 88 claims against 13 of their plans, for cleaning and household help that never happened. More than $1 million.

From 13 people. On the agency’s average, that’s a year of support for nearly 15.

The judge found she acted “in a calculated and deliberate manner to maximise the personal benefit of the fraud”.

And when some money did go back, the judge said that wasn’t remorse. As it was reported, it was “a methodology” to “reduce the chances of her conduct being detected”.

She pleaded guilty four days before her trial. It wasn’t the agency that caught her. It was her own customers.

17:28 Number 5

Three and a half years. Ordered to repay $443,000. Number five.

Paul Tilbury. He ran a disability provider in South Australia, and he controlled its bank accounts. 19 participants relied on it. Some of them were children.

For two years he overclaimed, double claimed, and claimed for support that was never provided at all. $404,000 in false claims.

And he moved $410,000 into his own account. Labelled “CEO loan”. And “CEO expense”. It went on rent, travel, fine dining and tobacco.

He called himself “Doctor Tilbury”. The court noted he wasn’t qualified to use the title.

Here’s what his clients told the court. The fraud had damaged “their trust in all NDIS providers”. Because of the betrayal, they’re “now stressed about who they can rely on to provide the care they require”.

It wasn’t the agency’s checks that put it onto him. It was complaints. And he wasn’t referred to prosecutors until three and a half years after the offending stopped.

He asked to serve his time at home. The judge said that “would not be a sentence of appropriate severity”. Three years.

18:37 Number 4

Number four. Rehana Memon. An occupational therapist in western Sydney.

Her profession is assessing what people need. The reports she wrote were meant to tell the scheme what support a person should get. She was convicted over false reports and claims worth more than half a million dollars. 22 counts.

A health professional, trusted to tell the truth about what disabled people needed, using that trust to cheat the scheme.

She was struck off. Banned from the NDIS for good.

Six years. One of the longest sentences ever handed down for NDIS fraud.

And five properties were forfeited to the Commonwealth. She went to the Supreme Court to try to undo that, arguing the paperwork had only been served on her solicitor.

19:23 Number 3

She lost. Number three. Operation Pegasus. A syndicate in Western Sydney. Six people convicted.

The federal police say some of the claims used false medical reports, to get NDIS funding for people who didn’t have a disability. And false GST refund claims to the tax office, on top. $5.8 million, across the scheme and the tax office. The biggest case on this list.

It wasn’t the agency’s checks that cracked it. Reports from the banks to the financial crime watchdog, AUSTRAC, helped narrow the investigation.

When police moved in, in April 2021, they seized eight kilos of gold bullion from a vault. $635,000 in cryptocurrency. A Porsche Cayenne. A BMW. An Audi.

One member helped pull more than $2 million out in cash.

The top sentence was six and a half years. The last of the six was sentenced in September, almost five and a half years after the raids.

Police seized more than $2 million. More than $6 million was restrained. Last November, about $1 million had actually been forfeited.

So why is the biggest only number three? Because for all its size, the public record says little about who it hurt. That’s not the same as hurting nobody.

20:39 Number 2

Number two. Alaedine Rifai and Amal Hilmi. They didn’t need to know a single participant. They typed random combinations of numbers into the agency’s provider portal until a stranger’s budget came up.

They went after budgets that had just expired. Money a participant hadn’t managed to use. The money nobody was watching.

68 people with no connection to them. $1.5 million. Messages put before the court show what it looked like from their side.

One day in July 2018, she processed 11 payments from nine people’s plans. Then she texted, “I made $44,000. LOL.”

Another time, she told him she’d found “a big one”. $43,000. He replied, “Wow, you take it all.” She wrote back that the participant had $55,000, “but I don’t feel good about this one.”

On another day, $59,000 landed. The next day, $83,000 went on a Porsche.

One message talked about everyone getting Rolexes when they hit the million.

When the agency rang about one claim, they refunded $4,000, and kept going. After the agency started a review, prosecutors said, they registered four new entities. And kept claiming.

Here’s what it cost. In court, a statement from a carer was read out. After the money came out of her son’s plan, she couldn’t pay for his nappies.

The judge who heard their bail application said disabled people had been left without funding, causing them “significant hardship”.

Rifai’s own lawyer told the court, “any rudimentary audit process would have them discovered.”

22:20 Number 1

Both went to jail. More than four years each. About a fifth of the money was forfeited.

And number one. On our ranking, the worst convicted NDIS fraud case on the public record.

Ebtesam Fahmy. 57, from Sydney. The court heard she started out taking children to school and daycare, paid through their NDIS plans. She learned how the system worked. Then she opened her own business. Quick Health and Care Services. A registered NDIS provider.

Over two and a half years, she billed the scheme more than 1,000 times, against the plans of 44 participants, for services that never happened. $2.2 million. More than a million of it in the first year alone.

On the agency’s average, that’s a year of support for 33 people.

To do it, she used the details of two real businesses. Both connected to participants in her own care. One belonged to a participant’s uncle. The other, to a woman whose daughter she looked after. The judge called it “a breach of personal trust”.

She made a cleaner on her staff the director of a second company. The judge found she used her employees’ identities “to disguise” what she was doing, and “to minimise the risk of detection”.

Then there was the paperwork. The judge found she fabricated agreements, and forged, or had others forge, the signatures of six people. 17 documents. The prosecutor called them “clumsy forgeries”, made after the fact.

And here’s the moment it should have ended. In July 2022, according to her own lawyers’ letters, her former staff were telling participants she was using their plans illegally.

Her lawyers wrote to them. They called it defamatory, and threatened to sue.

The claims kept going for almost another year. Until police came through the door.

A jury found her guilty on every count. The judge found “greed rather than need”. And he said she hadn’t been a first time offender since her second offence. “It was only that she had not yet been caught out.”

24:20 Who caught them

Seven and a half years. Four before she can be considered for parole. The government says it’s the heaviest sentence ever imposed for an NDIS crime. The money is still being chased through the courts.

She maintains her innocence. Now line those ten up a different way. Not by how bad. By who caught them.

The cleaner was reported by her own customers. The fake companies, by participants. Tilbury, by complaints. The syndicate, with help from the banks. And Fahmy’s own former staff were raising the alarm a year before the search warrants.

In most of these cases, somebody outside the agency had to tell it.

And look at the dates. Three of the ten were claiming in the same few months, in the middle of 2018. The pair in Sydney. The provider in Melbourne. The mowing business in Bendigo.

That September, the agency changed its provider portal. To find a participant, a provider now needed the participant’s number, date of birth and surname.

One more thing. The only one of the ten who paid back everything is the one at number ten.

Add up the money on the record for all ten. About $14 million.

25:26 Eight cents in the dollar

Last year, the scheme paid out that much in less than two and a half hours.

So how much is going out the door that shouldn’t?

In 2023, the agency’s own estimate was that somewhere between 6 and 10 per cent of everything it paid could be non compliant, fraudulent, or just wrong.

This year, the agency’s head of integrity transformation gave a parliamentary inquiry a single number. About 8.3 per cent of the $45 billion paid the year before. About $3.7 billion.

The agency calls it integrity leakage. It’s wider than fraud. It includes honest mistakes and sloppy paperwork. And the agency says there’s no reliable way to tell how much of it is crime.

Spread across every Australian, that’s about $133 each. In a single year.

In April, Mark Butler described the scheme like this. It had “become a soft target for shonks and rorters, as well as the worst elements of organised crime.”

In the same speech, he said this. “When we talk about fraud in the NDIS, we are not talking about people with disability. We are not talking about families who have been put on a plan or offered support. They are not doing anything wrong.”

Then he said the government’s own fraud taskforce had found eight design failures that leave government programs open to fraud.

“The NDIS has all eight.” It had also found seven building blocks that every high integrity program needs.

“The NDIS has none of them.” And this. “Currently the NDIA has no visibility of evidence for 90 per cent of claims that are made by plan managers or by providers directly. That’s around 600,000 claims every day without supporting evidence.”

600,000 claims a day. And for nine in ten of them, the agency can’t see the evidence.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has described how organised groups work the scheme. Kickbacks paid to participants, on what it calls a scale “ranging from collusion to coercion”. Butler said the commission found large cash withdrawals and asset purchases were common, including efforts to hide where the money came from.

In the Northern Territory, the regulator reported participants being offered cash, alcohol and cigarettes to sign agreements they didn’t understand.

Last November, during a single week of raids, investigators said they found claims made for participants who were in prison at the time.

And the regulator has permanently banned one provider, and its director, for what it called “improper and false service claims for participants who were deceased or incapacitated”.

Claims for people who had died. In November 2022, the government set up the Fraud Fusion Taskforce. Two dozen agencies. More than $1.35 billion has been invested in it and the programs around it.

By the end of June this year, here’s what that had produced in court. 26 convictions. 17 people jailed. And $3.5 million ordered back.

The agency says its crackdown has saved more than $2 billion, including more than a billion in payments it stopped before they went out. That’s its own figure, and it may well be right.

But look at the scale of the checking. The agency says that over two years, it reviewed more than 265,000 high risk claims. Worth $420 million. More than half were rejected.

Over those two years, the scheme cost about $97 billion. By our count, that’s still about four dollars in every thousand.

Now hold the other numbers side by side. $3.7 billion leaking in a single year. $3.5 million ordered back by the courts, since the taskforce began.

$3.7 billion is a lot of money. It’s also about eight cents in every dollar.

The other 92 cents is the real story. Not because it’s stolen. Because of how it’s spent. The prices. The middlemen. And a door that never closed.

29:24 The report card

When the Auditor-General grades a government agency, it uses a short scale. Effective. Largely effective. Partly effective. Not effective.

In 2019, the Auditor-General looked at the agency’s fraud controls. It found the agency largely compliant with the rules, with work under way that had “the potential” to make them effective.

Six years later, the same office looked again. It found the scheme had been designed and run, right up to 2024, without basic prevention controls.

Here’s the report card now. The regulator that watches the providers. Partly effective.

In its first year, the regulator received 1,422 complaints. Five years later, 29,054. 20 times as many.

How the agency managed daily living supports, the biggest spending category it has. Partly effective. Only about 60 per cent of the plans the auditors reviewed met the agency’s own quality requirements. And of nine earlier recommendations on decision making and fraud controls, seven still hadn’t been fully done.

In 2021-22, a single staff member could prepare and approve a plan worth up to $385,000. On their own. That year, 17,707 plans went through that way. $2.2 billion.

How the agency manages whether claims follow the rules. Partly effective.

To be fair, the auditors rated the agency’s board largely effective. One grade up. But in a separate audit, the same office found that board was non compliant with the government’s fraud rule. It hadn’t signed off an updated fraud control plan.

And look at the details. In 2018, the regulator and the agency signed an agreement to share information, and to meet regularly to keep it working. Between July 2018 and April 2025, the auditors found three meetings. All three from August 2024.

For a whole year, the board’s own papers and minutes weren’t kept in the records system the agency’s policy required.

And two years running, the Auditor-General qualified its opinion on the agency’s performance statements. The first time, it said the information on fraud and non compliance was not complete.

None of that is fraud. It’s the machinery. And for most of the scheme’s life, the machinery was still being built while your money went out.

31:42 Eight per cent

Nobody was on the door.

In 2023, National Cabinet, the Prime Minister and every premier and chief minister, agreed on a number. From 1 July 2026, the scheme’s growth would be held to 8 per cent a year.

Butler called 8 per cent “simply unsustainable in the medium to long term”.

And growth did come down. From 22 per cent, to under 11 by June 2025.

That halved it. That’s real. For the year before the target took effect, the government’s own forecast was 8.4 per cent.

It came in at 10.5. Nearly half a billion dollars above the scheme actuary’s own projection.

And by April, before the 8 per cent target had run for a single day, National Cabinet had agreed a new one. 5 to 6 per cent, or lower.

Because by then, there was more bad news. In just four months, Butler said, the actuary’s forecast for the next four years had blown out by another $13 billion.

32:37 The door, finally

So in April, the government announced the biggest change to the scheme since it began.

On its own modelling, the number of people on the scheme would fall to about 600,000 by the end of the decade, instead of growing past 900,000.

In the May budget, $37.8 billion in savings over four years.

Now, after everything in this episode, you’d expect most of that to come from the crooks.

The Grattan Institute went through the budget. It estimates that about $900 million of it comes from fraud measures.

$900 million. Out of $37.8 billion. Less than three cents in every dollar of the savings. More than a third, Grattan estimates, comes from cutting participants’ budgets.

In August, the law passed. Both major parties voted for it.

Some of the lock is real. In April, a new law let the agency move to fully electronic claims. In August, parliament created new offences for offering participants kickbacks, and for destroying records to defraud the scheme.

13 years in. From 1 October, as plans are made or reassessed, budgets for social and community participation are being cut by up to half.

From the same day, a new program called Thriving Kids starts taking on young children with mild to moderate autism or developmental delay. Outside the scheme. As of late September, Queensland still hadn’t signed up.

Here in the West, Butler told Perth radio that WA, probably more than anywhere else, kept a lot of those services going. So now, in his words, they “can be simply scaled up”.

From April next year, a new standardised assessment tool will help decide how much funding people get.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman has already raised a concern. He told the fraud inquiry the agency had said the only way to review a decision from the tool was to go back to the tool, with new or changed information.

And he asked a question. “The question is... who’s actually making the decision?”

In a written submission, he went further. “As the Robodebt scheme illustrated, efficiency gains are fundamentally flawed if they come at the cost of integrity.”

People with Disability Australia said: “We are devastated. We are frightened. We are angry.”

They asked how the government would replace, in their words, “the 94 million hours of paid care that are being taken away”.

From 2028, getting in will no longer depend on a diagnosis. It will depend on a standardised assessment of what a person can do. An idea very like the one that was killed in 2021.

13 years after day one, the door is finally being built.

And far more of the bill for the lock goes to the people inside, than to the people who broke in.

35:12 The ledger

So. 13 years. Let’s add it up. Support for people with significant and permanent disability. For a great many of them, it’s been life changing. People showering and eating in their own homes. People moving out of institutions. Last year, 81 per cent of participants aged 15 and over said they had more choice and control in their lives. When they joined, it was 67. That’s the promise, kept.

410,000 people. It’s 782,000. Under $14 billion a year. It’s more than 51.

Children helped early, so they’d need less later. Instead, for a great many families, the scheme became the only help there was.

An insurance scheme with a front door. It was built as a door that didn’t close.

A regulator to watch the market. It arrived five years after the money started flowing. And 15 in every 16 providers being paid weren’t on its register.

Every dollar to the people it was for. By the agency’s own estimate, about eight cents in every dollar leaked.

Your half a per cent. Every pay. Since 2014. Four dollars in every thousand checked.

And now, the fix. The ten worst convicted cases add up to less than two and a half hours of payments. More than a third of the savings comes from cutting participants’ budgets.

In the first episode, nobody asked. In the second, nobody went and looked.

In the third, it said so on the payslip. In the fourth, everybody looked. It took 13 years, and not one dollar came back.

In the fifth, nobody had to break a rule. In the sixth, nobody outside the college had to look.

And this time, for 13 years, nobody was on the door.

Audit This.