The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability was established earlier this year to promote human rights and respond to abuse, neglect, violence, and exploitation experienced by people with a disability. It’s expected to run for three years.

The royal commission will likely aim a spotlight across the entire disability support sector, highlighting all areas where disabled people are treated unfairly. The commission won’t just focus on physical mistreatment of people with disability. It will also seek to uncover financial abuse and other forms of non-physical exploitation.

Disability support services providers will need to ensure they are in full compliance with all NDIS requirements or risk severe reputational damage as a result of the royal commission.

Complying with NDIS requirements can be tricky

Support providers have to navigate an increasingly complex financial environment as a result of the NDIS. Where they would previously receive a lump sum payment, they now receive piecemeal payments based on the services they provide to individuals.

At a recent NDS conference with close to 600 attendees, a live audience poll revealed that respondents overwhelmingly cited processes and administration as an issue that would keep them awake at night. Managing compliance was the most pressing area, following by the cost of audits.

Compliance and audits can seem like an insurmountable challenge due to the difficulty in bringing all the required paperwork and documentation together in a timely fashion. Using an intelligent information management (IIM) platform can make this much simpler, since documents are managed according to what they are, not where they’re saved. This makes it easy to find the right documents, ensure no document is ever lost, and control versions of the same document.

Increased burden of compliance

While the NDIS has given individuals more control, it has created an accounting and compliance burden for providers.

Some of the key challenges are:

• cash flow unpredictability and difficulty planning for the future
• difficulty in meeting ongoing operational costs without reliable cash injections
• accounting and administration requirements that take staff time away from helping clients.

You need to make sure you can track your team’s billable hours, invoice each client accurately and in a timely fashion, and accurately claim your payments back from the NDIA as well as conduct end-to-end business reporting, facilitate plan management, and be prepared for audits.

Doing all of this manually isn’t really an option; the chances of making an innocent error are significant and the ramifications could be severe in light of the royal commission. If you are found to have defrauded the NDIA, you could be liable to criminal prosecution as well as civil action.

An IIM system can help by providing a reliable, scalable, and secure way to manage documents far more intelligently, add digital workflows that save time, and run reports that provide exceptional visibility into issues affecting your organisation.

How to get compliance right

1. Know what’s required
   If you’re not sure what’s required, you can contact the NDIS Quality and Safeguard Commission. Its job is to help you understand your obligations and it will conduct periodic audits to assess your performance. If you make a mistake with compliance, the first step will be education and development. Enforcement is a last resort. This gives you a chance to make sure you get it right.
2. Understand how your organisation complies
   It’s important to have the right systems and processes in place to ensure compliance with your responsibilities. Relying on individuals and manual processes to manage compliance can be a recipe for disaster. It’s far more effective and efficient to automate as much of the process as possible, which can help reduce errors.For some smaller providers, a spreadsheet or database may be enough to help you comply. However, managing these can quickly become time consuming, so it’s worth investigating workflow management and automation solutions that can be highly affordable and deliver strong efficiencies.For example, Storata has developed a solution based on M-Files that is specifically designed for NDIS providers. It leverages the unique metadata approach of M-Files to make documents instantly visible, apply workflows, and ensure compliance.
3. Apply governance and oversight to ensure ongoing compliance
   It’s important not to assume that, just because you have the right processes and systems in place, that your organisation is complying. Errors can happen and sometimes people will take shortcuts. Therefore, you need to have governance and oversight in place to ensure your organisation doesn’t fall out of compliance.
4. Address non-compliance urgently
   If you find out that your organisation has been non-compliant, it’s essential to address the issue immediately. If your non-compliance has been detected because it was reported to the NDIS Commission, its first step will be to support you to comply. It’s essential to show good faith and eagerness to comply during this stage to avoid moving onto more serious repercussions.If you continue to fail to comply, whether because of inadequate systems or wilful non-compliance, the consequences will escalate through investigation to compliance notices and enforceable undertakings, then to injunctions and infringement notices, up to civil penalties, then, finally, a ban on taking any further part in the NDIS.

Storata partners with leading software vendor, M-Files, to provide leading edge and affordable solutions to help you comply with all NDIS requirements. To find out more, read our blog on the role of technology in supporting NDIS compliance, or contact us today.