Raising debts of advance payments 107-04030000

Customers can receive advances of their payment under the provisions of the:

• Social Security Act 1991 (SSA)
• the ABSTUDY Policy Manual
• the Family Assistance (Administration) Act 1999

The advances are recovered through deductions from the customer's ongoing payments. A debt is raised for the balance owing where it is not appropriate to recover the money this way.

This procedure does not apply to advance payments for the Home Equity Access Scheme. See Advance payments for Home Equity Access Scheme loans.

If a customer transfers from one Social Security Entitlement to another (for example, from JobSeeker Payment (JSP) to Age Pension), the advance payment balance transfers to the new payment. Recovery will continue, as both are Social Security Entitlement payments.

Advance debts are usually raised automatically 21 days after the date of the event where the customer:

• transfers from one type of payment to another, which is not a Social Security Entitlement payment. The outstanding advance balance becomes a debt. For example, customer transfers from Parenting Payment (PP) to Farm Household Allowance (FHA). As FHA is not a Social Security Entitlement, the amount owing on the PP advance balance becomes a debt
• transfers from one Social Security Entitlement payment to another, however the new payment is not granted within 21 days of cancellation of the original payment
• is no longer entitled to any payments
• has an FTB advance and their rate of FTB Part A does not recover the advance quickly enough

Raise a manual advance debt where the customer:

• transfers to an Income Support Payment and the correct ABSTUDY cancellation procedure is not followed
• has an FTB advance and their rate of FTB Part A does not allow recovery of the advance quickly enough

Raising these debts manually is at the discretion of the Service Officer. A number of factors must be considered before manually raising an advance debt.

Recording a customer's death will automatically raise a debt for any advance payment still outstanding. The system does not issue an automatic advice. The debt raiser must send a manual advice to the deceased customer's estate.