Euro,
Maybe you could help explain what this means from the DSS website.
As at 21 January 2015, the Department has received notification from 93 of the 103 Approved Participants stating that all of their claims are ready for processing. Some of the outstanding 10 are Approved Participants with large allocations. Of the 93, 90 have been assessed, and 81 have still been found to have areas of non-compliance in their incentive claims.
Particularly the part about non-compliance. Is there a real possibility that entitlements won't be paid due to some technicality in the system?
The issue is simple - but complex. Stay with me here
The NRAS 2008 legislation (prior to being amended in August 2014 to fix this issue) required that the formal market rental valuation reports , which are prepared by licensed valuers and which are required to set the market rent for every NRAS property in Year 1, must be dated the same date as the activation of the credit . However since 2008, consortiums had been allowed to have a 13 week "leeway" on this by DSS, so that;
1. they could determine the market rent in advance of settlement
2. then obviously from that they could determine the correct NRAS rent, and
3. provide the $ figure to the tenancy manager so they could advertise for tenants prior to settlement.
The whole idea was to ensure you the investor had a tenant ready to go when you settled- in other words, a little lead time so you didnt have to wait until settlement to do these things. Simple. Logical. Quite reasonable all round, right?
So why the delays? Well, change of Govt and change of minister - and change of software platform ( used to FOFMS - is now called NRAS Portal) have contributed to a bit of a mess. Now whether you care about politics or not you couldnt have failed to notice this particular Govt has more than a little ideological "inflexibility" in their make up... so the minister ( Kevin Andrews, and now Scott Morrisson) obviously appointed a new department head and then also commissioned the Australian National Audit Office to review the compliance of the NRAS - just for political point scoring I would guess... "hey, look at how responsible we are at managing Govt programs - and look at how much better we are than the last mob" or something similar... and this ultimately has meant that DSS is being forced to check, re-check and re-re-re-re-re check everything... hence the delays
Every consortium has had to go back and get every valuation re-dated, re-documented, then re-enter all the data into the new platform, with dates and documents all done from scratch - and resubmit it all. That's thousands . And this had to be done while they were also being asked to prepare incredibly complex and cumbersome documentation to accompany submissions for change requests to move NRAS allocation- which had to be submitted by close of business Dec 23 2014 .
Add it all up -- you have a bottle neck. Then you have Xmas, public servants off for holidays etc... and here we are in mid Jan wondering whats going on...
The latest news is - I believe its close to being finalised. In fact, I understand the CEO's of the big 10 consortiums were in Canberra this week to get any undotted i's and uncrossed t's attended to.... and as others have posted, some of the consortiums have had their credits issued- so clearly the payments will come
Moving forward, the legislation has been amended and now allows for valuations to be done within 91 days ( 13 weeks) of the activation date. So while the Govt may be technically correct in their pedantic approach to the payment of the 2013-14 credits, it does seem to be awfully churlish given the fact they'll allow exactly these practices to start again from this current NRAS year (14-15) and they only applied this high moral standard to last years credits - they didnt ask the consortiums to go back and resubmit all the 2008-2012 stuff....
Seems an exercise in point scoring with the public, to me, which is kind of ironic - I mean, here we are on a property investor forum and most people here barely know what NRAS is or how it works - or they thought they did but really didnt - or they read some stories about forks in eyes that were so erroneous I dont even know where to begin - and the non investing public knows even less about it . So why the Govt would bother with an audit of 1 year and then allow next year to go back to business as usual, seems kinda silly.
Anyhooo...almost there. Then back to business as usual with the 13 week leeway