1. Paying the child care rebate directly to services
2. A register of families which have left a service with unpaid fees

Typical comments about this topic included:

"CCR must be paid to the service and never the parent."

"The rebate should be paid to the centre who is providing the care, to reduce the family's fees. There should not be an option for a family to receive this payment directly."

"Make it compulsory for CCR to be assigned to the child care centre involved so that the parent’s child care debt is legitimately offset by CCR and the temptation for parents to pocket the CCR and leave the debt unpaid is removed."

"Given Child Care Rebate is paid purely to assist with child care fees, all rebates should be paid direct to service to ensure 100% of the rebate is going towards the cost of child care."

"Making parents accountable: You cant rent a home without ensuring your payment history is good so why are child care centres left in the dark as to a family’s previous payment history? If families know their problems will follow them it might change their attitude towards leaving a huge debt."

"Have a register we can look up new families that owe money so they do not centre hop. We would get these families to pay weekly and on time or we would stop care so we don't have a debt. "

"I like the idea of having a database of parents who have debt owing. This is costing my business a lot of money and time wasting in trying to chase bad debts."

"Parents register to be published with bad debts Discharge letter to be given by service to parents when they move to other centre. Centres could support this with a strict Financial Policy: no fees paid - no service."

"A national system database allowing centre's to list families that have left the service without finalising their account. Making families prove to Centrelink that they have paid the fees prior to payment of CCR would be beneficial also."

"This is a long term and ongoing problem and small businesses are suffering. We have thought that something must be done for a long time, but are told it is our problem to chase fees. Our experience is that debt collection agencies have no power to collect money and only cost us more in the long term."

"We chase parents as hard as we can for unpaid fees, but they eventually leave, change addresses and phone numbers and disappear leaving us with thousands of dollars owing. We are situated in a small country village and when we tried to enforce families to get their fees up to date we got a bad name around town. So frustrating!!

"The government should be more responsible in not allowing families to claim CCB entitlements when they owe services money. The CCB system has been imposed on services with extra administration pressures and now we are also wearing costs associated with unpaid fees."

"There is already a precedent with the Medicare of having to pay the account before receiving a refund: why is child care any different? What other scheme allows a government refund for an unpaid liability? Why if there is evidence that parents can easily rort the system and waste tax payer's money is nothing being done?"

"Our service is a single, privately owned centre and we write off thousands of dollars a year, and that's just the ones we get sick of chasing after several months, not to mention the time and money spent chasing the ones we do eventually get to pay - often at a discounted rate in order to get something rather than nothing. It's disgusting, there's no protection for child care providers and it's been a major ongoing issue for longer than the 15 years I've been in the industry, but everyone in authority is too scared to step up and do something about it."