Centrelink Process Times
This is an article forwarded from an accountant reflecting on how difficult for the farmers to get help during the drought. She also said how difficult it can be to get the age pension. Are others out there having the same issues?
"Rant warning:
I’m an accountant, with a client base that is 95% farmers. Aside from the usual, lately we’ve been doing a lot of Centrelink work. Either helping clients with Farm Household Allowance forms and a few items they can’t answer, through to filling the whole thing in. I’ve worked with many of these people for 15 years, including through the millennium drought (with EC support payments and interest rate subsidies etc).
Whilst the forms are not *too* bad (very similar to the age pension forms, which we help a lot of clients with too), what has blown me away is how difficult Centrelink has been to work with recently. Filling in farm viability assessments, we should be spending our time genuinely discussing the business, its operations and options. Instead it’s a form filling exercise in a website that crashes 2-3 times whilst entering (and saving stalls the system and you have to get out and refresh, but not too quickly or it doesn’t actually save the work). It takes 4-5 hours just to get the data in and cross check it. That’s without having any valuable discussion on the business and options.
But even before we get to that stage, there have been multiple times where documentation has been lost, despite being handed over at the same time, and situations where older asset values from past applications have not been updated with the information from the new form and that with the “new” assets tips the applicant over the asset threshold and they get rejected. There have been multiple round trips of 3 hours a pop to resubmit forms that have been lost (where an older farmer doesn’t have or want a myGov account). There have been hours wasted calling processing centres to ask them how they reached their assessment value when it doesn’t resemble what’s on the form submitted, only to have the staff unable to explain it (the only person who can is the one that did the assessing), and then have them refuse to put us through to the assessor and tell us the only avenue is to relodge (attempt 3), and to call the complaints line if we weren’t happy (you can bet your bottom dollar that we were not, and that we did call and give our polite opinion on how difficult the system is to navigate). Thank heavens for one particular angel who is a caseworker, who was able to empathise, and find the calculations, advise where the issues were (old assets), and how to lodge an appeal that included getting those items removed that were scrapped years ago.
We are finding similar issues with age pension applications. At least two I have done recently (well kind of recently), took 5 months to process, and one requires a special explanatory letter to point out that the assessor had read the information in the gentleman’s tax return very very incorrectly. I’m not certain how they expect people to survive during these lengthy wait periods!
I have written a letter to my local member this week, expressing my utter frustration with the holdups with the process, as well as some of fiddly silly rules (such as if you have FMD’s that you plan to pull in next month to plant your next crop with, those FMD’s are off farm assets, and may very well make you ineligible right now, so you have to wait to apply, even though your actual financial position in that financial year is no different). I do not hold high hopes, unless the member has ever been at the mercy of this department.
I feel for all that deal with Centrelink. However, please don’t let this scare you off seeking help. Instead consider it to be advice to seek help (rural financial counsellors are wonderful individuals, with a free service), and photocopy EVERYTHING. Resubmitting an application or part of one if bits have been lost, is much easier when you’ve got the photocopy to use. And good luck." R Nowland
Rosret
What your accountant describes above seems to be the trend of most Public Service institutions including the ATO.