Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, I can help here. Understand that Human Services will deliver $1,000 billion in payments over the next 10 years. Currently we deliver around $92 billion. This year alone our detected fraud will be at around $2 billion. We prosecute around 10 people per day for trying to defraud the health and welfare system. So when KPMG advises us that it is up to $3 billion I personally believe that that is a very conservative figure. I think it will be far greater than that. If we accept the $3 billion figure, that $3 billion represents 0.3 per cent of the money we will distribute over the next 10 years. International benchmarks suggest that fraud is averaging around four to six per cent in health and welfare services. I saw a report I think from Deloittes earlier on that suggested that fraud internationally is around that figure. We are taking very conservative approaches to all these figures. So 0.3 per cent as a saving in relation to the access card I think is quite a conservative figure.

See this speech in context