Salvos help bring positive change for ACT residents facing sudden debt
- deansimpson7
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
As the ACT Government and ACT Revenue Office work to review the administration of the Home Buyer Concession Scheme, The Salvation Army has advocated for and highlighted the experiences of people experiencing disadvantage.
The Salvation Army recently submitted a series of recommendations to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts and Administration in the Australian Capital Territory following the commencement of a review into the administration of the ACT Home Buyer Concession Scheme.
Following this, and engagement with the ACT Revenue Office, there has been a positive shift to be more responsive to experiences of financial hardship.
The scheme, which launched on 1 July 2019, allows eligible home buyers to receive a concession on stamp duty fees, enabling them to purchase a property with less additional costs.
The scheme has relied on self-assessment, ensuring a more streamlined process for obtaining the concessions. This year, however, between 2000 and 3000 users of the scheme found themselves indebted to the ACT Government, as they had been found to be ineligible for the scheme.
Notices were issued to these community members requiring payments, often of tens of thousands of dollars, due in as little as three weeks.
Many of the reassessed scheme recipients claim they had not known they were ineligible when they applied and had sought the concessions in good faith.
Formerly a Moneycare Financial Counsellor working in the ACT, Emily Seiler is currently on a secondment to the Policy and Advocacy Team as an Adviser.
“I’ve seen a very diverse range of people who are experiencing financial hardship in the ACT [with] a lot of very complicated life circumstances, and I think there’s this perception that if you own a home, you’re well off,” Emily said.
“What Moneycare deals with a lot of the time are people who are homeowners and are experiencing profound financial hardship, whether trying to keep their home is putting them in financial hardship, or their financial hardship is impacting their ability to keep their home.”
She said the main concern in this matter was that the first time The Salvation Army had heard of the debts was when the media reached out for comment. According to records, three ACT Revenue Office clients out of the thousands impacted had been referred to other financial counselling services.
“We (Moneycare) had not actually received any referrals for people who had these reassessment debts,” she said. “What that indicated was a bit of a breakdown in people who were experiencing vulnerability being identified and adequately referred for supports.”
Emily said once clients received letters informing them of their error and the requirement to pay back the cost of the concession, they had only three weeks to pay tens of thousands of dollars, which included interest charged from either when the purchase was made or when the client became ineligible for the concession.
“It’s a very large number of people,” she said. “If you look at the submissions to the inquiry, you can actually see people’s individual submissions where [they] talk about their experience with having the debts reassessed, and they mentioned financial hardship, feeling scared [and] not being able to pay this debt.”
“And what’s not happened is that referral to support.”
Emily said the key message from The Salvation Army to the ACT Revenue Office was the importance of earlier engagement with customers. She said that, instead of the first contact being a debt notification, once a reassessment had been undertaken and it appeared there was an issue, a better system going forward would be to reach out to seek clarifying information from the customer.
Emily said there was a great deal of willingness from the ACT Government to take on The Salvation Army’s recommendations, and that the team was really encouraged by the government’s commitment to approaching people with more wraparound support going forward.
She said the team at the Revenue Office were already implementing changes to their systems prior to discussions and is now considering further options.
“What is very well-documented, and we’ve got experience with as well, is that community members are less willing to engage with appeals processes,” she said.
“They can find that a lot more difficult to engage with, and so immediately applying a debt and then requiring the customer to engage with an appeals process is a larger administrative burden on them.
“Whereas what ACT Revenue is actually doing now in response to the feedback they’ve received is they are, in that first instance of reassessment, reaching out for information.”
Emily said that once people have been referred to financial counselling, there is a lot of hope for financial freedom from debts such as this one.
“Once people are engaged with the right support, there are lots of different options that we can look at [and] lots of different support services that they can be linked in with,” she said. “But it’s really about that first point of contact and making sure that people who are needing support are referred to support.”
