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The agency running the National Disability Insurance Scheme has spent more than half a billion dollars in one financial year on consultants, contractors and outsourced staff, blowing its own projections by $130 million, new documents reveal.
The $600m torrent of cash in 2017-18 is in addition to the $4.9 billion spent on direct support for disabled people and includes almost $250m paid to the Department of Human Services for “shared” staff and IT networks that have caused at least three major system meltdowns in the past two years. More than $55m was spent by the National Disability Insurance Agency on labour hire, temporary staff and recruitment services in just one year, despite warnings from the Australian Government Solicitor that in doing so, it may be in breach of workplace laws.
These procurement figures do not include the running costs of the agency, which has about 1700 full-time and permanent staff.
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The register of contracts and consultants reveals a deal to outsource the call centre to global firm Serco is worth $69.2m and not the $60m referred to by NDIA chief executive Rob De Luca at Senate estimates hearing in June.
“The figure referred to by the NDIA CEO in Senate estimates was exclusive of GST,” a spokeswoman for the NDIA told The Australian. Crisis public relations firm Newgate Communications has also been brought on for a second contract with the agency, this one worth $800,000 over seven months. Part of that contract — worth $152,400 — was paid out in the final month of the 2017-18 financial year, with the rest to be spent by the end of this year.
Newgate was notably involved in managing the media for the board of Ardent Leisure after the Dreamworld tragedy that killed four people. Newgate also represented disgraced former Melbourne mayor Robert Doyle.
Marketing agency FutureBrand has been handed a $165,000 contract relating to the NDIS’s “Brilliant Purple branding project” which, The Australian revealed yesterday, was largely borrowed from Bankwest’s “Brilliant Orange” campaign. Mr De Luca was managing director of the bank for five years before joining the disability scheme. A further $38.3m was spent on consultants — notably McKinsey Pacific Rim, Boston Consulting Group, KPMG and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu — to advise the disability agency on its botched independent pricing review, to identify problems with how housing funds are dispersed, and to help with “corporate planning”.
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