Understanding Job Capacity Assessment (JCA) reports 008-06070030

Answer: An Assessor can reopen a JCA report provided the status of the report is still 'Submitted', and is not yet 'Finalised'.

When a report is reopened, the Assessor can only access certain parts of the report to edit. This is sufficient for an Assessor to action a new referral, and protects those tabs that have implications on income support, participation requirements and mutual obligation requirements.

If the error is with medical information such as work capacity ratings and impairment ratings, the report should be returned (rejected) to enable the Assessor to make these necessary amendments.

Answer: The referring team may initially accept a report but later decide that it should not have been accepted.

If the report status is still 'submitted' and the referring team need to return the report to the Assessor for amendment, an online incident reporting form needs to be completed. Once this has been actioned by the Applications Service Desk, the referring team should be able to return the report.

Note: this action should only be undertaken when the change to impairment ratings or work capacity is likely to have an impact on their participation requirements/mutual obligation requirements or payment eligibility.

If the report status is 'finalised' and it may affect determinations of impairment ratings or hours of work capacity, the customer will need to be re-referred for an ESAt/JCA as a file assessment.

The system allows Service Officers to override details that has been auto populated from the JCA report onto the Medical Conditions Details (MC) screen and Work Capacity (WC) screens. This should generally only occur as a result of a Disability Medical Assessment (DMA) where the original JCA recommendations have not been changed, or as a result of an Authorised Review Officer (ARO) or Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) decision. The overridden data is maintained on the customer's record and notification of any changes is sent to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations system and will appear as an annotation on the submitted JCA report.

See Overriding Medical Conditions and Work Capacity recommendations in a Job Capacity Assessment (JCA).

Answer: Service Officers can view reports when they are finalised. To view the report, select the relevant JCA report in the customer's record in Process Direct via the Referral Summary or the More Options menu, select DSP Claim Summary and the JCA icon.

Answer: Yes. A new JCA referral cannot be made until the status of any previous referral is 'finalised'. Early finalisation of the previous report may be required in some circumstances, such as:

• A customer lodges a claim for Disability Support Pension (DSP) immediately after the initial report has been accepted, and a JCA is required to assess the customer's impairment rating as the initial report did not indicate a rating
• A customer applies for a formal review of a decision and a new JCA is needed
• In these circumstances, a staff member with relevant access can request early finalisation of the JCA report, to allow a new JCA referral to proceed