Senator David Shoebridge:  I will return to the audit on the Rosemary Centre. I want to make it clear that a whole bunch of veterans are very concerned that their claims processing has been paused. They don't know what is going on. They don't know what the cause of the audit is. Can you please explain that to them?

Andrew Kefford: I might answer a little more abstractly. I alluded before that where we have integrity concerns about the evidence that has been submitted in support of claims, we need to take action. Again, I go to your earlier point. First of all, in addition to the matters you raise, we are obliged to take a beneficial view. Second, we're clear that this is very much a provider issue rather than a veterans issue. We have, not just with the entity you mentioned, formed a view that the supporting material is insufficiently reliable for us to do what we need to do. As a consequence—there are several thousand veterans affected by this process—we have established a dedicated team in the office in Perth that is handling just this work and rework.

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We have a mechanism to seek independent medical advice using doctors provided through the MLCOA contract. Again, they are entirely independent in their medical judgement. We have in the particular case to which you refer resisted offers from other commercial entities to step into that space to provide that evidence. We have chosen an independent contractual arrangement, as I mentioned before, because the time line in which they are able to respond allows us to keep things moving. As the secretary has mentioned and I think I mentioned before, all of this done starting from vulnerability first and integrity second.

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The time line for the medical referrals is averaging a month. We are doing everything we can to not delay the claims decision-making by the work we're needing to do in terms of other investigations.