Resolving contracting complaints — responsibilities of funded service providers

Your organisation is responsible for responding to, and resolving complaints about the contracted services it delivers.

Under the contract with us, your organisation is required to have a complaint mechanism. This is to ensure you're able to effectively receive and resolve complaints.

In addition, under Section 3 Clause (2)(e) of the Community Services (Complaints, Reviews and Monitoring) Act 1993, ‘a service provider is to enable a complaint about the service to be dealt with fairly, informally and quickly and at a place convenient to the complainant’.

The provisions of the contract and the Act mean that, as an autonomous organisation, you have primary responsibility for investigating complaints about your organisation.

This includes complaints about:

• the contracted services
• the conduct of your staff
• the decisions and actions of your management and governing body
• the conduct of subcontractors that have our consent to fulfil part of, or all of the services we have contracted you to deliver.

We have an interest in assisting and working with service providers to resolve matters that pose a risk to the delivery of funded services to clients. This includes issues with an organisation’s internal management, which may indicate underlying problems with its governance practices or actions of the governing body.

The form and degree of our involvement will vary according to the circumstances, including:

• the nature and seriousness of the issues raised in the complaint
• how we became aware of the complaint; for example, we may have been the recipient of the complaint or it may have been referred to us by another agency
• how responsive the service provider has been in resolving the issues raised in the complaint
• whether the complainant is satisfied with the service provider’s response to, and resolution of the issues.

Depending on the nature and/or number of complaints about a service provider, we may need to:

• review the complaint and your response, and provide assistance or support, or investigate the matter further
• review your complaints mechanism

if necessary, develop and implement a formal improvement plan.

We are required, under certain circumstances, to refer complaints to relevant state, territory or federal authorities for review and/or investigation. These authorities also refer matters to us.

In most circumstances, we encourage complainants to deal directly with service providers to resolve their complaints.

However, a complainant may decide to submit a complaint to us, the service provider and other parties at the same time. Complainants may also escalate their complaint.

This highlights the importance of effective complaint handling at the first instance, to avoid unnecessary escalations.

Other parties that we or the complainant may contact

NSW authorities such as:

• NSW Ombudsman
• Fair Trading

Federal authorities such as:

• Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC)
• Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC)
• Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC)

Elected representatives:

• Members of parliament
• Ministers
• Premiers/ Chief Ministers

Media:

• Mainstream media
• Social media

If we receive a complaint about your organisation, we'll forward it to you for comment or resolution using the Contracting Complaint Referral form.

We refer contracting complaints to you to investigate and manage when the complaint:

• is about casework practices
• is about service delivery
• relates to a service provider’s internal management practices.

Contracting complaints referred to your organisation for resolution will be monitored by your assigned contract manager. In this way, we can provide any information and advice required to assist you to resolve the issues raised in a complaint.

It's important to view matters referred by us as an opportunity to act in good faith and identify areas for improvement, and so avoid or minimise the possibility of the issues recurring or the complainant escalating the matter.

To respond to complaints forwarded by us, we expect your organisation’s nominated representative to:

1. Commence implementing your organisation’s complaint management procedure to review or investigate the matters raised.
   This requires communicating with the complainant.
2. Record relevant details of your organisation’s findings in Part 3 of the Contracting Complaint Referral form.
3. Return the completed form within the timeframe specified.

We may request a short turnaround time, depending on the reason for the referral. In either case, the timeframe will be communicated clearly on the referral form.

If the matter will take longer than expected to investigate, notify us within the timeframe specified.

This is an overview of the necessary components of your organisation’s complaints mechanism, as required by your contract with us.

At any time, we're able to request copies of the documents referred to, together with any other material relevant to any complaint.

Requirements for your complaint management process

Your organisation must have a documented complaint management process that is regularly reviewed and updated to deal with any complaint about the contracted services.

We recommend your process aligns with ours to allow streamlined and efficient resolution of complaints. This includes:

• Sending an acknowledgment letter to the complainant within 5 business days of receiving the complaint.
• Sending a resolution and closure letter to the complainant within 25 business days of receiving the complaint.
• If the matter will take longer than expected to investigate, sending a letter to the complainant explaining the reason, within 25 business days of receiving the complaint.
• Advising the complainant that if they are unsatisfied with the resolution or outcome of the complaint they may also complain to us or a relevant authority such as the NSW Ombudsman.
• Having a process to receive anonymous complaints.
• Making your complaint management process document publicly available.

As part of having an effective complaints mechanism as agreed in the contract, we expect your organisation to keep and maintain proper records, including a complaint register that records accurate details and allows tracking of all complaints received in relation to the contracted services. This may include a spreadsheet to log and summarise all complaints received, and a separate folder in your document management system for each complaint handled.

Note that these requirements for your complaint management process are based on the NSW Ombudsman’s best-practice guidelines. We are subject to the same requirements.

Requirements for information to be publicly available

Best practice complaint management is for your organisation’s website to include clear information for clients, their advocates and the general public about:

• what they can complain about
• how to make a complaint
• how to make an anonymous complaint
• when to involve our department or the NSW Ombudsman
• how to escalate a complaint already made, including escalating to us and other government departments that fund the delivery of your services.

If you do not have a website, send the complainant a fact sheet with this information following receipt of a complaint.

'Unreasonable complainant conduct' is any behaviour by a current or former complainant that, because of its nature or frequency, raises substantial health, safety, resource or equity issues for the parties to a complaint.

Even if a complaint appears to be motivated by malice, it must be reviewed on its own merits as it may raise a legitimate issue.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to managing unreasonable complainant conduct. To deal with it, you can include strategies such as:

• limiting the complainant to a sole contact point
• restricting the subject matter of communications
• restricting communication to being in writing only
• limiting or terminating access to services (which requires a specific procedure to be followed).

If your organisation decides to implement any of these strategies, ensure it's well-documented in case the complainant escalates the matter to us, another state, territory or federal authority, or other interested party.

For help, refer to the NSW Ombudsman’s model policy and procedure on unreasonable complainant conduct.

From time to time, we may be required to investigate a contracting complaint made to us about your organisation.

We investigate and manage complaints about service providers when the complainant alleges that the service provider:

• denied a client access to its services or provided insufficient service
• may not have a complaint management process
• may not have dealt with the complaint according to its complaint management process
• may not have addressed the substance of a complaint.

Note that we follow a similar but separate process for dealing with allegations of misconduct, even if the allegations are made in a complaint.

We're required to assess whether the matters raised:

• are an exception or one-off circumstance
• are indicative of underlying issues that we can assist with.

To make this determination, we will communicate with you, in writing:

• notifying you of the complaint
• asking for a response to the complaint and the issues it raises
• providing examples of what is required to be included in your response
• specifying a clear timeframe for the response.

This affords your organisation an opportunity to assure us that proper process was followed.

Note that if the timeframe is short it is because:

• under the contract, it is expected or required that you have the information readily available to provide to us on request. This includes copies of your complaint management policy and complaint register
• We aim to resolve the complaint within the 25-business-day timeframe.

Depending on your response, we may have to investigate the matter further, or may work with your organisation to reach an agreement on how to address the issues raised in the complaint. We work with services providers to resolve issues informally, or formally through a Service Development Plan or Performance Improvement Plan, depending on the severity of the issues.

These resources will assist your organisation to develop a fit-for-purpose complaint handling process that aligns with best practice.

Complaint handling

Complaint handling by charities and not-for-profits - Justice Connect

Effective complaints handling guidelines - NSW Ombudsman

Complaint management framework and model policy - NSW Ombudsman

E learning - NSW Ombudsman

Better practice guide to complaint handling - Commonwealth Ombudsman

Handling vexatious or unreasonable complainants

Managing Unreasonable Complainant Conduct Manual - NSW Ombudsman

Managing unreasonable complainant conduct – a model policy and procedure - NSW Ombudsman

Unreasonable complainant conduct - Commonwealth Ombudsman