Purpose

The purpose of this Departmental Instruction is to provide information on the various stages of the annual property valuation exercise.

Background

Every November, specific income support cases requiring a property valuation are automatically selected and forwarded to the Australian Valuation Office (AVO) for valuation by April in the following year.  Once the valuations have been completed, they are forwarded back to DVA with the new valuation amount.  The output is then forwarded to the State Offices for updating.

A listing of manual cases is also produced at the time of the bulk run.  State Offices are required to manually prepare and forward these cases to the AVO.

Production run

The production run was carried out on the weekend of 7 November 1998.  The data containing information on the automatic review was forwarded to the AVO on 12 November 1998.  Schedules for automatic and manual cases have been provided to the State Offices.

Number of cases extracted

The following is a breakdown of automatic and manual cases extracted from this years bulk run:

State

Auto

Manual

NSW

918

363

VIC

750

218

QLD

629

184

SA

200

69

WA

198

79

TAS

184

35

Total

2879

948

Criterion for extracting cases

All service pension (SP), income support supplement (ISS) & DSS age pensioners (that DVA pay) who have property, business, farm or a sublet portion of their home and are:

• asset tested; or

• income tested but are within $10,000 of the prescribed asset limit.

Cases excluded from exercise

Pensioners who have had an AVO property valuation done since the last bulk run (8 November 1997) have been excluded from this years bulk run.

State Office to action manual cases

The following schedules have been forwarded to the State Offices for further action:

• Schedule of Manual Asset Valuation Review Cases (including cases without a previous AVO valuation);

• Schedule of Asset Valuation Review Dual Payment (DVA/DSS) Cases; and

• Schedule of Asset Valuation Business Asset Cases.

State Office action is required to provide the AVO with a form containing detailed information on each of the manual cases where a property valuation is required.  Records are to be kept and a Claims Management Systems (CMS) case should be created to ensure that all such requests are returned by the AVO and action completed.

AVO conduct valuations

The AVO will conduct the necessary valuations in the period from December 1998 to April 1999.  The AVO will update the valuation information and forward the updated information to DVA by the end of April 1999.

Updated data forwarded to State Offices

Printouts and an Excel spreadsheet of the updated property valuations will be provided to the contact officer in each State Office.  These reports can be expected early May 1999.

State Office update valuations

Once the updated data is received manual action will be required to update the Central Data Base (CDB) to take effect in conjunction with the indexation of the free areas in July 1999 (Ordinary Income Free Area, Asset Value Limit & Adjusted Income Free Area).  Cases where the value of property has reduced may be actioned for increase of the service pension from the next convenient payday.

Date of valuation to be used

All States should use 7 November 1998 as the date of valuation when updating cases from this exercise.

It is essential that this date be used to enable all the appropriate cases to be selected for next year's exercise.  Using another date creates complications for the bulk extraction.

Processing Information

Screens and processing information for PIPS/PC can be found in Departmental Instruction C54/96.

Contact Officer

The contact officers for this exercise are John Bruce (02) 6289 6441 and

Lucy Berger (02) 6289 6013, Business Delivery Section, Income Support Branch.