The Digital Transformation Agency is exploring opportunities to reuse the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s new Salesforce CRM system elsewhere in government despite an ongoing investigation into the original procurement. In recently tabled answers to questions on notice from a parliamentary inquiry, the National Disability Insurance Agency said it is currently in talks with the government’s…
A landmark review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme has recommended that the federal government develop a centralised online registry of locally available disability support and services for participants. All local NDIS providers would be listed on the platform, as recommended by the review, to enable participants and their navigators to search for providers by…
Confidential Salesforce pricing information was accidentally leaked to Microsoft in a 2019 tender for the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s new customer relationship management system, documents reveal. The blunder forced the federal government agency responsible, the National Disability Insurance Agency, to retender for the CMS – a contract that was subsequently won by the aggrieved cloud-based…
The personal details of 11,000 National Disability Insurance Scheme participants and other related parties have been compromised in a data heist from inside the National Disability Insurance Agency. A Sydney-based employee of the NDIA has been arrested and charged by the Federal Police for allegedly passing the stolen information to two other individuals posing as…
The long-awaited report from the Parliamentary committee Inquiry into the Culture and Capability of the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) has landed. And it is steaming. After ten years of NDIA and the operations of its National Disability Insurance Scheme, inquiries and literally thousands of submissions pointing to the same defect, this report makes the…
The agency responsible for the National Disability Insurance Scheme accepted Salesforce’s bid to deliver a new customer relationship management system knowing it would be “significantly” more expensive than Microsoft, documents reveal. But government officials involved in the evaluation of the tender did not mark down the Salesforce bid, with price being “unweighted” as a criteria…
The cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s new Salesforce customer relationship management system has blown out by more than 100 per cent, documents obtained by InnovationAus.com reveal. The $68.1 million blow-out comes despite the contract with the cloud-based software firm supposedly providing “price certainty” to the agency responsible for the NDIS. Documents obtained under…
Salesforce has been handed another $4 million for the customer relationship management system that will serve the National Disability Insurance Scheme from late October, bringing the cost of its work on the project to at least $124 million. The price hike comes as an independent investigation sparked by the Watt Review continues into the section…
Government services minister Bill Shorten has pushed back against suggestions that algorithms are being used to sort National Disability Insurance Scheme participants into support packages not suited to their individual needs. Responding to questions from InnovationAus.com about the use of automated decision making in the NDIS, Mr Shorten on Wednesday said there was no “massive…
An investigation into the selection of Salesforce as the provider of the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s new customer relationship management system has been ordered after potential issues with the procurement were uncovered. Public servants involved in the procurement that led to the contract, which has grown to become the software company’s largest with the federal…
The federal government has launched an independent review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme that seeks to improve outcomes for people with disability while putting in place a sustainable financial model for the scheme. NDIS minister Bill Shorten says the two-part review would report back to disability reform ministers by the end of October 2023,…
A parliamentary inquiry will examine the capability and culture of the agency that oversees the $30 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme after a series of recent decisions that participants say have eroded trust. The Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS quietly opened the probe into the National Disability Insurance Agency late last week, just months…
This fourth article in the Defending the NDIS series is an insider’s look at what happened when the government took a wrecking ball to the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s operating model. The NDIS is a case study in the crucifying complexity of policy and service delivery: it is also a case study in the failings…
The first article in the series ‘Defending the NDIS’, looked at the horrific complexity caused by the actuarial fiction of ‘primary disability’. The second article zeroed in on the unholy mess of assistive technology and the omission of Return on Investment in the NDIS financial sustainability analysis. Fictions and omissions have distorted and weaponised commentary…
In the first article in the series ‘Defending the NDIS’ – Complexity – I pointed to the actuarial fiction of ‘primary disability’ as the root cause of NDIS complexity. Algorithms have not and cannot fix this. In this second article, I zero in on the unholy mess of Assistive Technology. All Australians should be shocked…
The NDIS is a case study in the crucifying complexity of policy and service delivery. It is also a case study in the failings of digital government services. This is quite a statement about a national program that launched into full scheme operations just six years ago on 1 July 2016, having commenced in trial…
The political repudiation of the Commonwealth’s proposed changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme by all States and Territories was far more than a routine stoush of the federation.
What exploded on Friday 9 July was an episode of the conjunction of two extremely powerful forces – algorithms and King Henry VIII powers – each of which separately obliterates transparency and accountability.
‘King Henry VIII clauses’ are so named because of the unchecked power these involve.
When combined, the impact of algorithms and King Henry VIII powers on Australian citizens is unfathomable. These two forces are eating away at our democracy.
Marie Johnson on the NDIS blow-up over independent assessments
What exploded was not a fight about ‘reform’.
You see, the disability community desperately wants reform: after all, it was from the community that the NDIS was created. But reform is needed because the NDIS has been either accidentally or intentionally steered away from its intended purpose.
And the community might just know a thing or two about exactly where that reform is needed.
Brilliant insights for reform are detailed in more than 300 submissions to the Senate inquiry on independent assessments. And in countless submissions to a great many inquiries into the NDIS across its short eight-year life. The reform pathway is hiding in plain sight.
Fixated on the fallacious doctrine that anything can be automated – including apparently people’s lives and bad processes – the ‘listening theatre’ of government is not ‘hearing’ the universal calls for co-design whilst selectively referencing experts and elements of strategic reports going back to the original 2011 Productivity Commission Report.
What I and hundreds of thousands of disabled people and their families want to know is:
Why does it take a year to change bank account details?
Why does it take two years for kids’ wheelchairs to be approved – a quarter of the time that the NDIS has been in existence?
Why are sensitive reports and documents sent to the NDIA, repeatedly lost?
Why do we receive plans containing other people’s highly confidential details?
Why do NDIS plans have allocated funds of $2.02 for two years (this is not a typo)?
And why during the Independent Assessment campaign, were people receiving multiple cold call spam-like text messages, again often containing other people’s private details?
How this happens is a daisy chain of unmonitored mailboxes; no intelligent workflow; process dead-ends; off-system manual manipulation of data and documents; metastasised off-system databases; the passing around of spreadsheets; and a grotesquely complex website that makes a mockery of any notion of accessibility and inclusion.
That this happens so systemically is evidence of defective systems and processes at the core.
And pasted on top of these defective systems, will be defective algorithms.
Algorithms based on 400 personas that have not been co-designed, scrutinised, validated nor apparently tested. This is akin to having an algorithm developed to detect cancer from scans, without the process and algorithm validated by cancer domain experts.
Algorithms that are based on a mash-up of functional capacity assessment tools, where no evidence has been provided by the NDIA to the Senate Committee of the validity and safety of these tools when used together.
Algorithms that appear to have been developed without an ethics framework, according to evidence to the Senate Estimates.
And as a warning of what could possibly go wrong, the horrific examples of algorithm-driven funding assessment models used in the United States read like a template for NDIS independent assessments.
The US algorithm-driven funding assessments “hit low income seniors and people with disabilities in Pennsylvania, Iowa, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Arkansas and other states, after algorithms became the arbiters of how their home health care was allocated – replacing judgments that used to be primarily made by nurses and social workers.”
In Arkansas, “you had people lying in their own waste. You had people getting bed sores because there’s nobody there to turn them. You had people being shut in, you had people skipping meals. It was just incalculable human suffering.”
So serious is the risk of algorithms to human rights, especially for people with disability, that the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Edward Santow, expressed concerns about the NDIS robo-planning push.
“I’m very conscious that in the move towards the use of independent assessments in the NDIA that there is a risk that some of the mistakes that were made with regard to robo-debt could be made again in this context.”
This follows the landmark Australian Human Rights Commission, Human Rights and Technology Report, calling for a moratorium on the use of algorithms in decision making.
But the algorithm genie is out of the bottle, especially as an accompaniment to the “God-like” King Henry VIII powers – which in the leaked draft NDIS legislation, removes the veto power of state and territory governments. The same state and territory governments that are the co-funders of the Scheme.
In an article in The Saturday Paper, Rick Moreton explained that the King Henry VIII powers give the Commonwealth minister a new ability “…to make so-called ‘rules’ at any time, which the chief executive of the National Disability Insurance Agency must follow when interpreting the legislation.”
These ‘God-like’ powers determining rules that will not require the scrutiny of the Parliament, will be executed via opaque algorithms and not scrutinised by domain experts.
Indeed, a God-like power creating an algorithm driven funding assessment model that has been shown to damage people.
So the explosive meeting of disability ministers was not just about NDIS reform.
It was about the hidden agenda of the Commonwealth creation of a new architecture of automation and control that will reach across all servicing sectors: disability, veterans, aged care, education and beyond. The NDIS has long been the stalking horse of this disturbing future.
Australian civil society and the bureaucracy are tragically ill-equipped for the era of algorithms.
And the King Henry VIII powers government wants to grant itself will remove the rights and abilities of citizens to protect themselves against this dystopian machine-led future.
The recent report on Human Rights and Technology by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) made a landmark statement on technology as an enabling human right, and called for changes to the way in which the NDIS considers and funds assistive technology.
This significant human-rights statement also serves to highlight the economic impact of a vibrant and growing assistive technology market, estimated to be in the order of $4 billion per annum in Australia alone.
Assistive technology (AT) is broadly described as any tool, product, software or device that helps people do things they would otherwise have difficulty doing or would not be able to do. Examples include sensors, immersive environments, tablets, exoskeletons, wheelchairs, speech synthesisers and robots.
It is also significant that the AHRC report highlighted the human rights implications of the complexity, delays and inconsistency of NDIS assistive technology processes.
Marie Johnson: Innovations in assistive technology are an opportunity
And here’s why these statements matter. And why every technology provider, entrepreneur and government seeking an innovation-led economic recovery, should be concerned.
The dog whistling going on over the NDIS costs, misses this far more economically significant factor: the squandered potential of a massive assistive technology market which directly impacts Scheme sustainability and domestic innovation.
The brilliant foresight of the 2011 Productivity Commission Report into Disability Care and Support, emphasised the absolute necessity of innovation and technology.
So given the massive size of the AT market and the transformative impact of AT on jobs, the lack of analysis regarding AT by the NDIA is concerning.
Deep analysis and future casting is urgently needed, to provide essential insight on the shifts and possible futures of the AT and innovation industry.
Without this, of what use is financial forecasting on Scheme sustainability? And without this, how will “market thinness” into the future be understood?
In a number of Submissions to inquiries, the Australian Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology Association (ARATA) pointed to the systemic deficiencies and a culture against a return on investment approach by the NDIS for the funding of AT over time. Specifically, ARATA emphasised the need for…“methods to create a culture of selection of AT based on ROI.”
So, this is what a lack of an ROI culture looks like and how this risks dampening the AT market.
In my 2017 evidence as an AIIA National Board Director to the Senate Committee on the Delivery of Outcomes Under the National Disability Strategy 2010-2020, I spoke about the actual example of a physiotherapist consulting with patients on the other side of the country by using a digitally network-connected exoskeleton.
ROI in this case was not a like-for-like comparison between a wheelchair and exoskeleton. An exoskeleton does not replace a wheelchair: the combined augmented life-long benefits were documented across all dimensions of life.
This actual example from this exoskeleton NDIS provider demonstrated the human impact, time and cost of trying to prove ROI involved in introducing new servicing innovations for NDIS participants.
The article ‘Second Best’ by a former NDIS Senior Local Area Coordinator (LAC) also spoke about the NDIA’s resistant culture regarding the investment benefit of AT innovations.
In the ‘Second Best’ article, the former LAC described the situation of hearing-impaired people who have been fighting with the NDIA over visual alert systems such as ‘Visualert’ and haptic alert systems.
In Australia, smoke alarm legislation is very strict. For hearing people, the alarm must be heard from wherever they are in the home.
The ‘Second Best’ article offered that hearing impaired people would need a similar system.
Occupational Therapists and audiologists around Australia have been recommending visual alert systems because it keeps hearing impaired people safe.
But according to the ‘Second Best’ article, the NDIS is refusing these. Instead funding only cheaper systems that rely on batteries, pagers and WiFi. The ‘Second Best’ article reported that these systems do not meet the same strict safety requirements that hearing systems must meet.
And even the most fundamental of human rights and basic human care – for an incontinent person to be kept clean – is a domain of radical innovation.
Innovation almost impossible to imagine, given the reports from the Royal Commissions of the appalling rationing of incontinence garments.
The 2020 Report of the “Global Incontinence Products Industry” projects that the global market for incontinence care products will reach US$17 billion by 2025, with product innovation driven by RFID and sensor wafer chips.
Sensors will detect when the diaper has been soiled, as well as monitor body temperature, detect abnormalities in urine composition, and even help prevent bed sores by tracking how long it’s been since a person has moved.
Could smart diaper data, sensors and data analytics become part of a quality and safeguard framework. Think about what this would mean for the skills and management of attendant care staff.
And while there is an urgent need for discussion about jobs as part of Scheme sustainability, this discussion is incomplete without a discussion on the rapidly changing nature of work, an augmented services and care ecosystem of AI, robotics, immersive technologies, sensing and remote servicing.
Worryingly, most of these innovations would likely not be funded, not because these are not reasonable and necessary, but because there is not a culture or capability that understands the ROI of AT to Scheme sustainability.
As ARATA stated, creating a culture of ROI – not just “reasonable and necessary” – is absolutely necessary to fully leverage the $4 billion AT market to transform the jobs and skills market.
And over 10 years, that’s a $40 billion market.
It is unfathomable that the government is driving a narrative on Scheme sustainability, when the actuarial forecasting itself lacks any analysis on the ROI or adoption of AT.
And with the recommendations of the AHRC Human Rights and Technology Report, assistive technology has suddenly become a very significant human rights, sustainability and economic question.
But there is no clear pathway for the market.
I have lost count of the many entrepreneurs, providers and companies who have sought my help navigating the massive NDIS AT ecosystem and what it takes for a new innovation to be accepted as a funded support.
In the lead up to the Federal election, all parties should address the NDIS as an assistive technology innovation market catalyst – that enables human rights – and not squander this massive market on the false altar of cost-cutting.
The federal government’s plan to determine the size of NDIS support packages for over 400,000 participants by fitting them into 400 ‘profiles’ will be a test of algorithmic transparency, according to La Trobe University senior lecturer Dr Darren O’Donovan.
Minister for the NDIS Linda Reynolds on Thursday released a new paper providing detail on how the proposed independent assessments and “Personalised Budget” process will work.
These changes will require legislative reforms, and the government has conceded that it does not currently have enough support to pass them through the Senate.
Government Services Minister Linda Reynolds. (Photo credit: US Defense department.)
The proposed reforms have led to significant backlash and criticism, with numerous disability organisations, advocates and legal groups saying the process will likely lead to reduced funding for participants and will be less personal than the existing process through the use of algorithms and automation.
In the newly released paper. National Disability Insurance Agency CEO Martin Hoffman acknowledged that the planned reforms have caused “real fear and concern in the community”.
“I deeply regret our genuine attempts to share information about the changes, and consultation on them have not met expectations. I want to respond to the concerns we’re hearing and be transparent about the reforms we’re proposing,” Mr Hoffman said.
“By sharing more information, I hope we can create a greater understanding of the new approach and what it will mean for participants.”
The paper details how under the new system, NDIS participants will receive a “flexible” budget with fixed funding for specific purposes and flexible funding to be spent how the participant chooses.
This new budget will be determined by feeding the results of an independent assessment, to be completed by a contracted individual using “internationally recognised assessment tools”, into an algorithm featuring 400 profiles aiming to cover all of the more than 400,000 people accessing the NDIS.
Dr O’Donovan, a senior lecturer in administrative law at La Trobe University, said the technical paper fails to answer many of the questions surrounding this algorithm and the independent assessments.
“The agency has provided a vague list of ingredients without revealing the recipe. The document provides little to no insight into how assessment scores will be linked to financial amounts, or how environmental factors will be weighted,” Dr O’Donovan told InnovationAus.
The government’s NDIS plan will be a test of algorithmic transparency, Dr O’Donovan said.
“Will Parliament and the public be given access to a fully executable version of this decision-making tool. Will the financial modelling and allied health assumptions underpinning it ever be published?” he said.
“Without this, genuine co-design with people with disabilities cannot occur. Both the tool and the planners will be force-fed an evidential starvation diet of flawed independent assessment reports.
“There is a predictable attempt to introduce ‘human in the loop’ flexibility to supplement the algorithmic tool [but] the ability of a planner to intercede appears tied to limited exceptions.”
The 400 profiles have been developed by allied health professionals and expert planners at the NDIA, the paper said and will be used to produce a “draft personalised budget”. This budget will then be shared with the NDIS participant before they meet to discuss its details and finalise the budget.
“To draft a Personalised Budget, we will match the participant with a reasonable and necessary funding amount for participants with similar functional capacity and life circumstances,” the government paper said.
“We have built 400 profiles, each representing different groups of participants with different functional capacity, each of which has a budget associated with it. We take a participant’s assessment results and match them with one or more of these profiles, recognising that each participant is an individual and may not match perfectly to one individual profile.”
This draft budget will then be adjusted according to where the participant lives, how old they are and any informal support they have access to.
Each of these 400 profiles have an actual name and disability type, and have a similar age, disability type and functional capacity scores as actual NDIS participants.
But the NDIA is assuming that each of these profiles have “similar goals and informal supports”. The Agency said it is confident these profiles represent a “large portion of NDIS participants”.
In a press release, Ms Reynolds emphasised the apparent “flexibility” that this new process will deliver.
“Instead of creating a plan that has funding based on individual items and supports, the proposed changes will see participants receive one overall budget that they can use flexibly,” Ms Reynolds said.
“This was the original intent of the NDIS – for people with disability to be in control of the services and supports they purchase.”
This process has been widely criticised as “robo-planning” and as removing the individualised, goals-based approach to disability support.
A key architect of the NDIS dubbed the process as “robo-planning”, while the Opposition has said the government is in a “mad rush” to turn the scheme into a “human-free robo-system”.
The government has paused its plan to introduce these new assessments by July, but is still planning to launch them this year.
Ms Reynolds said the government will now consult further on the proposed changes.
“I have clearly heard the concerns of participants, their families and the wider disability community. This is why I paused enabling NDIS legislation so we can undertake consultation before we reveal the outcomes of the independent assessment pilot,” she said.
“I’m committed to openness and transparency, to build trust with the community so participants can be reassured that some things won’t change under this new proposal.”
After more than twenty years of ‘citizen centric’ strategies by governments around the world, this week saw the demolition in Australia of any pretence of citizen-centric, participant-centric, person-centric – or any other version strategy based on ‘human’ centricity.
The theatre of citizen-centric has now run its course. And in the year 2021, citizen-centric has been replaced by the ungoverned rise of machine-centric algorithms.
Last week under questioning at the Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS Inquiry into Independent Assessments, the NDIA revealed for the first time the architecture of the algorithms to be used in robo-planning.
Also in evidence, commentators including myself have raised serious concerns on the application of algorithms, and the additive impact of algorithms, on people with a disability.
Reduced to personas: The NDIA and its algorithms increasingly under fire
Lacking any transparency or ethics, the broad-brush description of the algorithm architecture involves the construction by the agency of 400 personas based on disability, age and other factors.
Would indigeneity, language, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) people and homelessness be factors? We don’t know. The determinants of the algorithm personas have not been subject to any independent external scrutiny.
The agency indicated that a technical paper would be released, and it is understood that the sector and academic and legal community will forensically examine it.
But given the timeframes promulgated by the government, any feedback is likely to be too late. The assumptions and determinants will have already been baked into the algorithm – or algorithms, as there will be more than one.
Algorithms that include debt recovery. And algorithms that include the extensive and yet to be legislated changes that the community only found out about because the draft legislation had been leaked.
And a cautionary word about ‘personas’.
Personas are typically the collaborative outcome of a co-design process, used to tell a story from the person’s perspective of their experience, with all the uncomfortable, confronting, and messy details of life. More controversially, they are often used in HCI design although with issues of stereotyping a major concern.
But the apparent use of personas in the construction of the NDIS robo-planning algorithms, is a perverted application of this method.
With the lack of transparency and ethics – and the absence of co-design – the algorithms become a construction of internal modelling where bias is inescapable.
Not only will bias be baked in, but the operation of these powerful algorithms is not subject to independent scrutiny or appeal.
And all this has arisen because the agency has created a seething mess of administrative and conceptual complexity that it cannot manage.
Sliding doors of complexity so unfathomable that the scheme itself has become manifestly unjust.
So their answer is to put over 530,000 Australians with disability into 400 persona boxes and wipe out any pretence of the notion “participant centric”.
We could see this coming over recent years when the word “co-design” disappeared from key corporate documents. I was criticised for pointing this out.
In reality, it matters not whether the number is 400 or 4,000 personas, as this approach treats Australians with disability as an amorphous data mass and not as individuals with rights, and with unique lives and needs.
And it is a harbinger of things to come for those on welfare, aged care and veterans.
Certainly data analytics is critical. And better and transparent data analytics is urgently needed.
But the political arguments around scheme sustainability not only ignore the benefits side of the equation, but completely ignore complexity as a most significant factor impacting sustainability.
The original 2011 Productivity Commission Report referred to complexity as “confusopoly”.
And an overwhelming number of the more than 260 submissions to the Inquiry on Independent Assessments describe the injustice and human rights impact of complexity on all communities, especially First Nations people, CALD communities, and people with psychosocial disability.
The Victorian Council of Social Service (VCOSS) Submission (number 153) for example describes the barriers of complexity, literacy and “magic words”.
The complexity sees documents and highly personal information, lost. This is the experience of a great many people evidenced in submissions to this Senate Inquiry and other inquiries including the Tune Review.
A recent poll on the NDIS Grassroots Facebook group (with 55,000 members), indicated as many as 80 per cent of people experience lost documents. This would be an enormous cost driver across the whole system.
Imagine if 80 per cent of people undergoing an Independent Assessment, had their documents lost. There is no guarantee that this will not happen.
So an end-to-end co-designed time-and-motion study would be immensely revealing. And this should be done before any structural changes to the scheme are made.
Automation and the application of algorithms, which will be inherently biased, do not overcome complexity nor the injustice, disadvantage and cost this causes.
To the contrary, there is international evidence that algorithms deployed by the state cause harm and compound injustice.
So, all up, it is not clear what ‘problem’ the personas are intended to address.
Except the effect of this is to digitally institutionalise people with disability into boxes, and to subject them to lifelong examination, study and control.
In response to the proposed changes that have been unanimously slammed by every sector of the community, Minister Reynolds challenged: “if somebody could come up with a better option…”
As if that challenge had not been well anticipated, in the more than 260 submissions to the Senate Inquiry into Independent Assessments.
People with disability, experts, health professionals, NGOs, service providers, state and territory governments, advocates: thousands of hours of documented evidence and insightful thoughtful solutions and recommendations.
Like many people, my family found the process of writing a submission detailing our harrowing experience, very painful.
But we, and hundreds of thousands of Australians have a vested interest in the sustainability of the NDIS.
And in stirring testimony at the Senate hearing, Mr Dougie Herd Chair of the ACT Disability Reference Group and one of the original campaigners for the NDIS, challenged back “…this is super personal.”
It is personal and yet we have been reduced to personas, components in algorithms.
The upending of the NDIS social contract has precipitated an insidious episode of servicing by algorithm, in which no Australian has had a say.
Until the government publishes the design of the algorithms and intended applications, their use must stop immediately.
Marie Johnson was the Chief Technology Architect of the Health and Human Services Access Card program; formerly Microsoft World Wide Executive Director Public Services and eGovernment; and former Head of the NDIS Technology Authority. Marie is an inaugural member of the ANU Cyber Institute Advisory Board.
Photo credit: NoDisadvantage Community on Facebook
The head of the NDIS has revealed for the first time some details of how the tech sitting behind the controversial new independent assessments will operate, raising concerns that a “cookie-cutter algorithm” will lead to reduced funding for people with disability.
It comes as the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Linda Reynolds said the NDIS is too reliant on the judgement of public servants and their “natural empathy”, and repeated the claim that the program is on an “unsustainable growth trajectory”.
The federal government is planning to introduce mandatory independent assessments by the end of the year, which will see contracted assessors conducting reviews of individuals rather than relying on evidence from their existing specialists.
This assessment will then be fed into an algorithm which will produce a budget plan for the NDIS participants, a Senate committee heard on Tuesday.
NDIA chief executive Martin Hoffman
The scheme has been branded “robo-planning” by a key architect of the NDIS, who compared it to the government’s robo-debt scheme, which led to a $1.2 billion class action lawsuit settlement.
The Opposition has also called for the independent assessments to be scrapped entirely, with shadow NDIS minister Bill Shorten saying the government is in a “mad rush” to turn the scheme into a “human-free robo-system”.
At a public hearing for the inquiry into the independent assessments on Tuesday, National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) CEO Martin Hoffman provided further detail on the algorithm which will be underpinning this new scheme.
After NDIS participants undertake a questionnaire and perform a task for the contracted assessor, these results will then be fed into an algorithm with 400 “personas”, he said, including the type of disability, age and other factors.
This system will then produce a budget plan for the NDIS participant.
“The results of the independent assessment give scores against the domains set out in the Act. Those scores against those domains are then used to determine a plan budget,” Mr Hoffman told the Senators.
“We’ve developed about 400 different reference groups of participants through disability type and age and a range of other factors that enable us to work out what a typical, flexible plan budget should be, derived from the scores and assessment from the independent assessment.
“That then gives the overall plan budget figure in draft, which is then the subject of the planning meeting to refine that.”
According to Dr Darren O’Donovan, a senior lecturer in administrative law at La Trobe University, this will see the use of a “cookie-cutter algorithm” to deliver packages that will not be tailored to NDIS participants.
“Rather than a hard-headed empathy that fights for broader economic benefits, we have management consultants whiteboard how to hit a number with a cookie-cut algorithm,” Dr O’Donovan told InnovationAus.
“This top-down approach will focus on what a person cannot do. It will no longer start with what they want to achieve and the benefits of supporting them. Packages derived from these internal ‘typical’ support amounts have often been found to not capture the supports people need to stay in study, to keep parents in the workforce, or to get out of the justice system.”
The 400 reference groups or “personas” in question have not been released publicly by the NDIA. Mr Hoffman said a technical paper about the process will be released “shortly”.
Dr O’Donovan said it’s not good enough that these details still haven’t been released to the public.
“It is unacceptable that the Agency has failed to explain its proposed new test for funding to this point. Independent assessments are part of a broader plan to cut costs from the Agency’s internal balance sheet. It is disrespectful of Parliament and people with disability to drip-feed key details of a proposed reform,” he said.
“In a matter of months the government wants a black box system of disability ‘scoring’ and 400 ‘personas’ to shape the lives of over 500,000 Australians and their families. The new planning process will start by asking: do you have level four or level five needs based on the contractor assessors’ finding?
“Based on that score, the government will fit 500,000 Australians into 400 boxes. These ‘reference groups’ and ‘typical amounts’ have never been published and the assumptions on which they are based are entirely untested.”
Also appearing at the hearing, Ms Reynolds reiterated her concerns about the “sustainability” of the NDIS in the long-term, and said the scheme is too reliant on individual and subjective decisions by public servants.
“We’re relying, I think, too much on individual public servants’ judgement and also their natural empathy,” Ms Reynolds said.
The federal government is still committed to introducing NDIS independent assessments, dubbed by many as “robo-planning”, despite recently “pausing” the rollout of the highly controversial scheme.
The government is planning to introduce mandatory independent assessments for those accessing the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) or trying to access the scheme. The program would see contracted assessors interviewing NDIS applicants and then determining how much support they need, instead of using individuals’ existing specialists.
The assessments have been slammed as a cost-cutting measure from the federal government and one which will see individuals with a disability receiving less funding.
NDIS minister Linda Reynolds says the government will proceed with controversial independent assessments. Image: U.S. Secretary of Defense.
The independent assessments have also been branded as “robo-planning” by several people, including a key architect of the NDIS, due to the use of an algorithm to determine the funding an individual will receive, and an emphasis on uniform funding rather than an individualised scheme as intended.
Following widespread criticism, NDIS minister Linda Reynolds, who was recently appointed in the role, put the rollout of the independent assessments on “pause” and promised to more widely consult with stakeholders.
But at a Senate Estimates spillover hearing on Monday afternoon, Ms Reynolds, in her first public appearance since taking on the new ministerial role, recommitted to the introduction of independent assessments, making it clear the rollout had been delayed rather than reconsidered.
“I have at no time said that we won’t proceed with independent assessments in some form. I have had very, very little feedback that people don’t agree about the need for some form of independent assessments. Most of the feedback I’ve heard to date is not actually about the need to have them at all because that is something that has been long known,” Ms Reynolds said.
“I’ve been very, very clear that it is imperative for all of the reasons we have said that we go ahead with some form of functional independent assessments. What form they take is very much the subject of consultation.”
Ms Reynolds attempted to position the policy reform as an effort to make the NDIS more fair and transparent and lead to more consistent decisions.
“If you can find other ways that would achieve the same results for fairness and consistency and for all of the other factors that went into independent assessments being written into the scheme many years ago, then I’d be very happy to hear them. But nobody has come up with any better alternatives,” she said.
Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John replied that the “entire disability community” is united against the independent assessments. Senator Steele-John labelled the trial of the independent assessments as an “absolute debacle” and questioned why the government wasn’t considering the scrapping of independent assessments as a potential outcome of the planned consultation.
In a lengthy opening statement, Ms Reynolds focused on the ballooning costs of the NDIS and the need to ensure that it is “sustainable”, laying the groundwork for the introduction of the cost-cutting measure.
She also said that there have been issues because those working at the NDIA are “human” and are inclined to say yes to a funding request, also paving the way for the introduction of a more automated scheme such as the independent assessments.
Last month Bruce Bonyhady, a key architect of the NDIS, slammed these independent assessments, saying they are akin to “robo-planning” and will “blow-up” the scheme.
“With no transparency, robo-planning could be used to exclude participants, cut plans or change the NDIS eligibility criteria. And the NDIA would not be able to be held to account for such actions. The fact that robo-planning has reached the current stage of implementation is a disgrace. It should have been stopped long before now,” Mr Bonyhady said in April.
“They are robo-planning from the government who brought us robodebt and, as with robodebt, robo-planning is based on flawed mathematical algorithms,” Mr Shorten said.
“It has been constructed in a black box and the disability community fear it and detest it legitimately. Those currently in charge of the scheme see people with disability as numbers on a page, data in a system, a cost to be reduced.”
There is a lack of ethics and oversight in the government’s experimentation with new technologies through the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) that could lead to significant human rights violations, former NDIS Technology Authority chief Marie Johnson says.
In a submission to the Joint Standing Committee Inquiry into the Independent Assessments under the NDIS, Ms Johnson, who is now the chief executive of the Centre for Digital Business, pointed to “fundamental defects” in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) technology systems and processes, and raised concerns about the potential to incorporate new technologies into this system.
Ms Johnson has direct experience of the NDIS on both sides, with her husband, daughter and grandsons accessing the scheme.
“There would be perhaps few other NDIS applicants or families who would have the insight at the beginning of their journey to make such detailed documentary recordings from the outset,” Ms Johnson said in the submission.
Marie Johnson: The lack of an ethics framework in the NDIS tech experiments is dangerous
The committee is examining the new Independent Assessments being used to decide what people’s needs are and how much funding individuals would receive through the NDIS, in the place of using doctors and medical reports.
There are concerns that this is a cost-cutting measure that may not give the full idea of an individual’s needs.
Ms Johnson labelled the new assessment process as “utterly flawed, unethical and dangerous on every level”, and that this is the direct result of a lack of an ethics framework at any level of the NDIS.
Ms Johnson also looked at experimental digital activities being conducted across government, including facial recognition through the digital identity scheme and the application of blockchain for NDIS payments.
“The [committee] needs to be alerted to the linkages between future blockchain and facial recognition applications as a means to control and monitor NDIS participants, and the risk that algorithms pose for people with disability in accessing services,” she said in the submission.
“The absence of an ethics and co-design framework exposes NDIS participants to potential human rights violations from these experimental whole-of-government digital activities.”
The Digital Transformation Agency has been leading a trial of using blockchain technology with the NDIS, along with the Commonwealth Bank.
The trial combined blockchain technology with the New Payments Platform to create smart money, which was programmed to know who it could be spent by, what it could be spent on and when it could be spent.
“This enables NDIS participants, service providers and the government to have real-time visibility of service eligibility, with appropriate access controls for privacy,” the DTA said.
NDIS participants have been invited to trial the initiative through a Smart Money prototype app.
But Ms Johnson said she is concerned about the on-the-ground use of the technology, associated civil liberties risk, and what happens when something goes wrong.
“Given the horrendously complex NDIS environment, defective processes and vulnerable people, there needs to be considerable caution in the application of blockchain technology. Blockchain in itself – as with other technology innovations – does not address fundamental design and human rights issues. Ethics is paramount,” she said.
“The involvement of the Commonwealth Bank itself raises further ethics issues, given the value of participant data, the size of the market, and the yet to be realised market honeypot of data, funds and services.”
If such a technology was implemented more widely with the NDIS, transparency would be greatly reduced for participants already subject to the new Independent Assessments, she said.
“So, in a not-too-distant future scenario, a participant would be served a robo-plan, arising from an Independent Assessment, with the robo-plan services transacted using blockchain programmable ‘smart money’,” Ms Johnson said.
“Far from participant choice and control, there would be no transparency to the Independent Assessment, no transparency to the robo-plan algorithms or rules, and no transparency as to the blockchain algorithms.
“Whilst there is no transparency or effective appeal rights for the participant, the system would achieve real-time and pre-emptive life-long monitoring and control of NDIS participants by the government.
“Whether by intention or inadvertence, this is a dangerous future emerging without governance or ethics.”
The government is also planning to introduce facial verification technology into its digital identity offering, myGovID, with UK tech firm iProov recently awarded a near-$11 million, three-year contract to provide a “liveliness” solution.
While this is not directly related to the NDIS yet, Ms Johnson said its use has “significant human rights implications for people with disability”.
“The committee needs to be alerted to the linkages between future blockchain and facial recognition applications as a means to control and monitor NDIS participants, and the risk that algorithms pose for people with disability in accessing services,” she said.
Invitations were sent to NDIS participants inviting them to take part in the trials of the new Independent Assessments, including language such as “exclusive invitation”.
This saw participants being “lured” into using the new scheme through similar tactics to identity and financial schemes, Ms Johnson said.
“It is utterly unethical and verging on maladministration that this type of communication is used at all, let alone in communications targeted at people with disability, and which would include vulnerable people with psychosocial disability,” she said.
“This is a direct consequence of the lack of an ethics framework and lack of ethics oversight more broadly.”
Technology should not be used at the expense of people with disabilities, she said.
“Australian civil society must not tolerate the actions of government that forcibly and arbitrarily subject people with disability to lifelong examination, study and monitoring. History is a reminder of where these actions can lead,” Ms Johnson said.
“That this control of people with disability will be effected through technologies such as biometrics, algorithms and blockchain is anathema to a harmonious and inclusive civil society and the human rights of all people.”
