In the June 2022 Payment Statement you may have noticed one (or many!) seemingly random adjustments to the Accommodation Supplement paid for current and/or previous Residents, along with a strange comment in the Provider Notes section. Some of you might have even seen these in your May statement. The note looks like:
If you’re wondering what in the world is going on, you’ve come to the right place!
So, what is going on in my Payment Statement?
As you all might know, Services Australia is in the process of updating the Aged Care Payment System as they prepare for several changes including those driven by AN-ACC. And, as part of the integration, we were informed that the system has been checking previous payments to ensure they have been paid correctly. This resulted in a series of adjustments made to previously paid Accommodation Supplement amounts for Residents across the entire industry in the “body” of the Payment Statement (Itemised Payments Section for Permanent Residents). However, not all these adjustments should have been made and to correct the reduction, a “counter-adjustment” was made in the Provider Notes, to bring the net adjustment to $0.
In most cases, as the net value of these adjustments should be $0, there will be nothing for you to do. However, it might be a good idea to validate they have been cancelled out and so that you can be sure there is no material impact on your funding this month.
Okay, so do I need to do anything? How do I find out if it impacts me?
There are two ways to easily determine if you’ve been impacted by these adjustments:
- If you are a MyVitals user, navigate to your Dashboard and look at the tile for “Total Supported Funding”. If there has been an irregular or unexpected decrease to this value compared to last month, it is likely due to these adjustments.
- If you are not a MyVitals user (but MyVitals users should do this too), navigate to the “Provider Notes” section of your Payment Statement. If you see a note that begins with “ACCOMMODATION ADJUSTMENT OFFSET AS THE RESULT OF INCORRECT SUPPORTED STATUS” and there is an amount listed in the “TOTAL AMOUNT:” section that immediately precedes it, at least one of your Residents listed in the Itemised Payments Section for Permanent Residents of your Payment Statement will be impacted by these adjustments.
These adjustments could apply to 0, 1 or 20 or more Residents who are or were at your Facility. In most cases, as mentioned above, you won’t need to do anything. If you’d like to be certain there is no material impact on your funding, we’ll go through an example reconciliation below.
How do I ensure there is no material impact on my funding this month?
Firstly, if you are part of our Revenue Executive Service or Revenue Sustainability Pathway, we will do the reconciliation for you so you can relax! If you don’t use these services or have never heard of them and would like to learn more, please speak with your Advisor, or send an email to team@providerassist.com.au and we will be in touch!
If you’re going to be braving this on your own, the first thing you’ll need to do is identify whether you’ve been impacted by these adjustments at all. So, let’s navigate to the Provider Notes section of St. Agni’s Payment Statement for June 2022. We can see that St. Agni have the note displayed in the first part of this article but also have the following note immediately afterwards:
This tells us that Services Australia has made a (+)$2,397.34 adjustment (payment) to St. Agni to offset an “incorrect supported status”. Essentially, this means that Services Australia have made this adjustment to offset the incorrect adjustment made in the in the Itemised Payments Section for Permanent Residents of the Payment Statement.
Now that we know St. Agni is impacted by these adjustments, we will navigate to the Itemised Payments Section for Permanent Residents of the Payment Statement to find out which Residents this applies to and to confirm the net adjustment value is $0.
After looking through the Payment Statement, we have found the two Residents for whom we believe the Provider Notes adjustment applies! They are Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. An excerpt of their itemised payments has been included below.
As you can see, there have been several negative adjustments made to the amount of Accommodation Supplement these Residents were paid many months and years ago. The adjustment amount for Duke Ellington comes to -$1,856.37 and -$540.97 for Ella Fitzgerald. This gives us a total Accommodation Supplement adjustment amount of -$2,397.16.
Now that we’ve figured out the total Accommodation Supplement amount adjusted in the Itemised Payments Section for Permanent Residents of the Payment Statement, we simply add this to the amount detailed in the Provider Notes. So, we take our (+)$2,397.34 adjustment from the Provider Note and add it to the -$2,397.16 from the Itemised Payments Section for Permanent Residents section for a total net adjustment of $0.
Now that we have confirmed the net adjustment value is $0, St. Agni can rest easy knowing they don’t have to action these adjustments any further!
Speak with us if you need some assistance
If you’d like more information about this issue, other supplements, subsidies, fees and funding or any of our services and the AN-ACC transition, please reach out to team@providerassist.com.au and we will get you the help or advice you need.
Shavin Perera
Business Services Manager
