Media Release
Monday 19 June, 2006
Child Support Agency appoints National Compliance Manager
Mr Matt Miller, General Manager of the Child Support Agency (CSA), today announced the appointment of Angela Tillmanns, as the new National Compliance Manager to head up CSA's $143 million four year compliance program.
Mr Miller said the compliance program was a key component of the Australian Government's reforms of the Child Support Scheme announced on 28 February this year.
"Currently there are 1.4 million parents who use our services and 1.1 million children who benefit from them," Mr Miller said. "Last financial year alone the CSA transferred a total of $2.4 billion dollars between parents."
"We calculate Ms Tillmanns' team will generate an extra $460 million in child support for children over four years - a great return on investment for the Australian taxpayer."
Ms Tillmanns, who has almost 30 years experience in the public sector and is the former CSA State Manager for Queensland, said that most parents genuinely want to do the right thing for their children and may not be aware that they were not meeting their responsibilities under the law.
"Helping people to do the right thing is always our first port of call and over the life of the child support scheme we have achieved 96 per cent compliance," Ms Tillmanns said.
"However, we will also have a strong focus on those customers who deliberately avoid paying the correct amount of child support because that is not fair to the other parent, the children involved and taxpayers who contribute through increased family tax payments," she said.
Extra funding will increase CSA's compliance program in five main areas:
- working closely with the Australian Tax Office to improve the rate and timeliness of lodgments of payer tax returns to increase the accuracy of payments, which will lead to an additional 100,000 parents referred to ATO (compared with the current 24,000 referred);
- increasing by six-fold the number of investigations into parents who are deliberately minimising their taxable income to avoid paying child support (as parents become more clever about how they hide their income the CSA has to employ more skilled and senior staff to undertake these complex investigations);
- more than doubling the use of Departure Prohibition Orders - a very effective approach where people with child support debt are prevented from leaving the country;
- increasing the scale of the currently successful Intensive Debt Collection program by more than two and a half times, which will target an additional 22,500 parents per year; and
- where Intensive Debt Collection is unsuccessful CSA will have increased resources to take an additional 650 parents to court per year which is at least double the current number.
"As always, court action will only be considered when all other possible avenues of resolution have been exhausted," Ms Tillmanns said.
Ms Tillmanns encouraged parents with child support debts to contact the CSA and negotiate a repayment schedule as the chances of getting caught are increasing all the time.
"People are far better off taking the initiative to resolve these issues so that they are in control of their circumstances."
Mr Miller said Ms Tillmanns' exemplary record as CSA's State Manager in Queensland, her outstanding relationships with key stakeholders and government agencies and her very tough but fair approach to compliance made her the perfect appointment to this critical role.
Media enquiries:
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media@csa.gov.au
