John Dardo, the NDIS integrity chief, revealed in fiery Senate testimony in 2024 that the scale of fraud in the scheme was so great that the justice system would be overwhelmed if all scams were prosecuted.
Fraud boss warns NDIS is losing billions to inappropriate and criminal claims
NDIS fraud boss John Dardo has revealed up to 10 per cent of claims were inappropriate or criminal – costing Aussie taxpayers up to $5 billion a year.
Julie Cross@juliejourno
February 12, 2026
Up to 10 per cent of NDIS claims are inappropriate, made in mischief or are outright criminal, according to the scheme’s fraud boss.
Co chair of the Fraud Fusion Taskforce, John Dardo, told Senate Estimates that he couldn’t give an exact figure on fraud within the scheme, but said he had a good idea of the cost of what he called “integrity leakage”.
He described that as inappropriate claiming, claims made in mischief, and then there were those where it could be proven the claims were made with intent to defraud. He said those claims were around six to 10 per cent of the total budget.
“We have been transparent about the leakage out of the NDIS,” Mr Dardo said.
This year the scheme was originally forecast to cost the taxpayer $52 billion, but has been revised down to $50.7 billion, meaning the amount being lost in this financial year could be up to $5 billion.
Mr Dardo, who is also deputy CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency, the organisation that runs the scheme, was unable to give a clear figure on just fraud, when questioned by Senators Anne Ruston and Pauline Hanson.
He admitted that sometimes the cost of prosecuting bad actors within the scheme was not worth their time, because to get a conviction they needed to prove there was intent to commit fraud, which is difficult to do.
Sen Ruston said that was a poor message to send out to would-be-fraudsters
Mr Dardo said only a small percentage of the six to 10 per cent responsible for “integrity leakage” had been taken to court.
At the moment he said there were 53 people who have been referred to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) and are in front of the court at various stages.
He said 16 were actively being prosecuted right now, nine were awaiting trials and there were nine briefs with CDPP to progress. There were also several dozen cases at a pre-warrant status.
Mr Dardo said most of their work was preventive and what they had achieved since 2022 was “mindblowingly awesome”.
“We’ve stopped over 2500 providers from being able to claim from our systems for a combination of reasons,” Mr Dardo said.
Those providers had claimed $5 billion in total.
“We have several hundred more we are working through our pipeline looking at to stop claiming from this scheme.
“It is mathematically impossible to take 2500 providers and prosecute every single one of them and in fact you are not even sure that you should or need to because you’re not sure that all their behaviour was criminally malicious.
“But stopping those providers from claiming against the scheme means that genuine providers are actually getting the work and the business they should be getting and it means genuine participants are not being ripped off and it protects participants from providers that are dodgy and that is phenomenal.”
He said on average his team was rejecting from self managed participants $13m of claims a month.
“The breadth of interventions is unprecedented; it’s never been done in any government program in history,” Mr Dardo said. “Some of these interventions never existed before we built them in the Fraud Fusion TaskForce.”
