[Mchelle Morris]

Hi, I have a customer who was in a defacto relationship and purchased a property with him many years ago. They never married but at that time she decided to “take” his surname as if married and started using it without needing to verifying who she was to any agencies.

The property title, bank accounts etc are all in this name “Smith”. Now they have separated but as it was not a divorce and she has again chosen to use her maiden name which centrelink have accepted. Today she is applying for a pension concession and we cannot and will not be able to match the name on our records and the LTO with her name record held at Centrelink. When we do an electronic verification with Centrelink there is no provision to match the ratepayer name with a Centrelink “alias” which is what her old surname would become.
Do you have any suggestions? I have advised her that at this stage I cannot grant her a pension concession.

[Susan Pardy]

Hi Michelle,

We have a range of situations where we are aware of discrepancies (exceptions that are reported as mismatches) with pension concession names and ratepayer names. For example, a surname “O’Donnell” in our rates system doesn’t match “ODonnell” on Centrelink’s system; a ratepayer with the name of (for example) Susan Therese Pardy but the Centrelink record is Therese Pardy because they go by their second name; or a spelling mismatch like “Faye” and “Fay”.

So do you have other records that are ‘known’ mismatches that you could note and record for future exception reports? (We keep track of these using notes or memos and when the exception report comes in we note next to it the reason that the PC is still to be granted based on the notes we have previously recorded).

Just trying to think of other ways around knowing that it will come up as an exception but where you know that it is in fact the same person…

Cheers,
Susan

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