Release of an Employment Services Assessment (ESAt) report to customer 001-02320050

In most cases, an ESAt report can be released by an APS4 Service Officer or above, outside the formal Freedom of Information (FOI) process. Within Services Australia this is termed 'Informal Access'.

An ESAt report can only be released under Informal Access when:

• there is no current Disability Support Pension (DSP) new claim (or review of decision)
• there is no unfinalised Disability Medical Assessment (DMA) report on the customer's record
• the Assessor has not documented any concerns in the report about it being released to the customer
• the status of the report displays as 'finalised', this means no further changes can be made to it

Formal Requests under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 must be in writing. FOI requests must be immediately forwarded to the FOI Team.

For more information, see Requests lodged under the Freedom of Information Act 1982.

The Referral Summary and Referral Detail in Customer First show a summary of all ESAt referrals for the customer and includes information about the status of the report (for example; submitted, finalised) and the Assessor that submitted the ESAt.

For release under Informal Access, consider the release of each report on its own merits.

A staff member with the relevant access can request early finalisation of the ESAt report.

Applying a manual finalisation solely to enable the release of the report should only be done after checking that this action will not affect the agencies decision about the customer's income support payment, or the customer's referral to an Employment Services Provider based on the submitted ESAt report.