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As part of your Centrepay obligations, your business must provide us with an incorrect payment policy. Your policy needs to be clear, simple, and easy to use.
To be approved to use Centrepay, you need a policy that sets out how you’ll identify, prevent, manage and fix incorrect payments.
An incorrect payment can be when a deduction is any of the following:
- not covered by a Centrepay deduction authority
- paid to your business in error, this may include duplicate payments or amounts paid that is more than the amount owed to your business
- paid for goods or services excluded under Centrepay.
An incorrect payment is also when the amount of credit you are holding for a customer is not likely to be used in either period:
- 12 months for utilities
- 6 months for any other goods or services.
Creating your incorrect payment policy
When creating your policy, it must be easy to access, read and understand. This means it must use Plain English and use clear headings.
Your policy must explain all the following:
- how you’ll monitor customer accounts, this so you can confirm when and why a customer is holding a credit with your business
- what you’ll do when a customer has a credit with your business and how you’ll tell them
- the process for when a customer wants to change, suspend or cancel their Centrepay deduction
- the steps your business will take to prevent future incorrect payments and how you’ll notify your customers
- how you’ll manage and reconcile deductions on behalf of your customers to ensure you’re meeting requirements of the Centrepay: Terms of Use.
The policy must also say you’ll do the following:
- advise the customer of the incorrect payment, and how your business corrected this, in writing, or verbally if a written response is not possible.
- refund the payment within 10 business days when escalation to Services Australia is not needed
- contact Services Australia at least 20 business days before issuing an incorrect payment to a State or Territory authority for unclaimed monies.
- comply with any written direction from us on how to deal with an incorrect payment, then tell us what you did.
Incorrect payment policy template
This is an example template to help your business when writing an incorrect payment policy for Centrepay.
This template is a guide and should be adapted or added to depending on your business needs.
We recommend including version control information.
Highlighted text should be filled in and the highlight removed before using.
Meeting your obligations when handling incorrect payments
In addition to your incorrect payment policy, your business must comply with certain incorrect payment obligations when using Centrepay.
This includes, but isn’t limited to, the following:
- apply your incorrect payment process to resolve incorrect payments
- if asked, provide us with details about how you investigated, managed and returned incorrect payments
- train your staff in Centrepay and your incorrect payment policy
- meet your privacy obligations when managing incorrect payments.
Businesses approved for Centrepay must meet their contractual obligations as outlined in the Centrepay Policy for Businesses and Centrepay Terms of Use.
If you don’t comply with your obligations, we may suspend or remove your business from Centrepay.
Reporting incorrect payments
If your business is holding Centrepay incorrect payments and you have taken all reasonable attempts to refund the customer and can’t, let us know and we will be able to assist you.
To tell us about an incorrect payment, you need to send us an email with all the following information:
- how the incorrect payment occurred
- details of your attempts to return the incorrect payment to the customer
- a copy of your incorrect payment policy and what processes you have in place to prevent and manage future incorrect payments
- details of any more incorrect payments your business holds
- whether your business is required to, and have you, reported this incorrect payment to the relevant regulatory authority.
Send your email to recoveries.centrepay@servicesaustralia.gov.au.
Our Centrepay for businesses team will reply with a Services Australia Centrepay Incorrect Payment returns spreadsheet for you to complete.
If you need help
If you don’t understand your obligations or you’re worried you’re not complying, you can contact our Centrepay for businesses team.