Two Thousand Children, None of Them Real

Between January and July 2017, two family day care services in western Sydney looked after 2,132 children.

They claimed 398,936 sessions of care. That is more than two and a half thousand sessions of childcare every working day, for seven months. In one month alone they enrolled more than 1,600 children, about three quarters of their entire book, in about four weeks.

Not one session happened. Not one child was ever there. The Commonwealth paid $9,274,016.

Three years earlier, in a house on the New South Wales side of the Murray, one woman running one service put in 80 false claims and was paid $3,646,269.72. Fourteen children were named on them. The payment she used was the one set aside for children at serious risk of abuse or neglect. It could run to nine thousand dollars a week for a single child, the provider decided for themselves that the child was at risk, the provider set the hourly rate, and the decision to grant it could not be appealed by anyone.

This episode is about how both frauds worked, which took no skill at all, and about the system that paid for them, which is the part that should worry you. A form the provider filled in themselves. A risk assessment the provider made themselves. A rate the provider set themselves. And a report by the government’s own umpire, published in 2014, that set out in plain words exactly how the payment could be used.

It ends with the Auditor-General. Over six years the Commonwealth identified thirteen million dollars lost to child care subsidy fraud, and recovered $116,707 of it, from seven cases.

Episode one ended because nobody asked. This one ended because nobody went and looked.

Built entirely from the public record. No speculation, no dramatisation, no guessing at what anyone was thinking.