Fair Entitlements Guarantee
The Fair Entitlements Guarantee (FEG) is a payment scheme that helps employees who have lost their job because their employer has gone into liquidation or is declared bankrupt. Employees can claim certain entitlements that their employer can't pay.
BACKGROUND
Insolvencies are rising
Data modelling predicts continued rise in insolvencies in 2025. Workload due to increase. The division doesn’t have a funding model where they get more resources with increase in work. Systems and process need to be streamlined to support increase in workload.
Timeliness
Timeliness is a FEG KPI of the department which it did not meet in 2023-24. The impact is that people who have lost their jobs must wait longer to get their dues .
Reputation
Not meeting department SLAs can also lead to increase in complaints and media attention, and even complaints to the minister
COHORT
The users of the system maybe internal but the beneficiaries of the work are people who have lost their jobs.
Current STATE
To manage the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Recovery Program, the FEG Finance Team uses a range of digital systems. These tools are not connected to each other and rely on FEG staff to manually re-type the same data into multiple systems.
FEG staff need to regularly update, check, and track data to ensure the data remains as accurate and reliable as possible.
Reports are created by the Finance Team to inform FEG decisions. These reports require an unsustainable amount of manual inspection and validation by staff.
The end-to-end digital enablement of these processes is very poor.
The likelihood of errors appears is ‘almost certain’ and the potential consequences can be very significant. The risk to DEWR of the current FEG financial processes has beenassessed as ‘very-high.
Painpoints
Manual entry of data from funding minutes and eFEG tool into the financial tool is time-consuming and prone to errors
Gaps between finance tools and actuals occur, leading to a labour-intensive reconciliation
Tracking 90+ matters manually increased the burden on matter managers
The Active Creditor and Recovery Funding teams decided to establish distinct manual processes after losing confidence in the financial tool
Data entry and reconciliation during Delta review are time-consuming, causing delays and conflicts in information
BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
Reducing claim processing times and improving accuracy, boosting assessor productivity and enabling faster payment of entitlements to FEG claimants.
Enhancing system usability, accessibility, and reporting.
Achieving full compliance with the department’s security directive by 30 June 2026
Enhancing trust and security for FEG users interacting with online services
FUTURE STATE
Approach
Horizon 1
Strengthen core business operations
Horizon 2
Explore new and emerging opportunities
Horizon 3
Explore disruptive, future-oriented ideas
The three-horizon model helps structure efforts by prioritising ideas, pain points, wish lists and opportunities using the desirability, feasibility and viability framework.