The Australian Government is committed to ensuring investment in the early childhood education and care sector is used appropriately. Family Assistance Law (FAL) sets the rules for administering Child Care Subsidy (CCS).
On this page:
Our approach
CCS improves families’ access to quality early education and care, supporting:
- children’s education and development outcomes, and
- parents to work, train, study and volunteer.
Misappropriation of CCS undermines these goals. It damages the sector’s reputation and increases costs to the Australian Government and taxpayers.
To ensure CCS is spent appropriately under the law, we have 3 main goals:
- support providers to follow the law
- correct provider behaviours that are not in compliance with the law
- move providers that don’t follow the law out of the sector.
Our vision
The department’s vision is to:
- deliver a world-leading, whole-of-system regulatory approach
- efficiently and effectively protect the integrity of CCS.
Our Child Care Subsidy (CCS) Financial Integrity Strategy describes the activities we undertake to achieve this goal.
Our strategy
Our CCS Financial Integrity Strategy outlines the department's approach to maintaining the financial integrity of CCS.
It describes how we identify, prioritise, coordinate, implement, respond to and measure integrity activities and operations.
Identify
- We use a range of approaches to identify non-compliant and fraudulent behaviour in real-time.
- We use data and analytics to identify emerging integrity risks and support earlier interventions.
Prioritise and coordinate
- We prioritise risks and target our work to the highest areas of value.
- Our compliance approach uses interventions to support and respond to providers at different levels of compliance.
| If you – | We will – | |
|---|---|---|
| Support | are voluntarily compliant | provide information and resources to help you to remain compliant, such as sector communications and our frontline CCS Provider Helpdesk |
| Inform | are unintentionally non-compliant | provide information and resources to help you to become and remain compliant, such as our Geccko online learning resource, sector capacity building, early interventions and frontline advice |
| Correct | are opportunistically non-compliant | correct non-compliance and address exploitative and opportunistic behaviours, through audits, infringement notices, sanctions and placing conditions on approvals |
| Enforce | are wilfully non-compliant | use the full force of the law through issuing penalties, court proceedings and criminal charges. |
Respond efficiently and effectively
- We manage our data and reporting to provide reliable information on risks.
- We measure how our activities lead to outcomes.
- We collaborate with states, territories and other regulators to better understand provider behaviours and risks.
- We collaborate with the sector to understand and prevent non-compliant behaviour.