Strategic Review of the Australian Apprenticeships Incentive System

Hello,

We write with regard to the apprenticeships review submission.

We don’t want to comment specifically on retaining apprentices, but give some feedback from a small business perspective, specifically with regard to claiming incentives for apprentice training.

We are a small business, with a staff of only 5. We have trained and employed all of our 4 employees. We currently have 2 apprentices employed, one in his final year, and one who has just begun his 1st year. Our concern is that the system currently used to claim our employer incentives for hosting these apprentices, is VERY time-consuming and laborious. We appreciate the government funding that is offered, but the system to submit this information needs serious improvement. I am referring to the Apprenticeships Data Management System. When we are eligible to make a claim, we have to log in to this system and not only upload every single individual payslip for the period of the claim, but then manually type in the dates of each pay period, as well as the gross amount paid for each payslip. This information is already clearly detailed on each payslip I upload. Not only this, but I could also easily upload each payslip required in one single uploaded report. It is ridiculous when we use computer systems that provide all of this information, that we have to manually double enter the information. The whole process takes me a good hour to complete each time I make a claim. If I was able to upload the one report with all the information required, it could be completed in 5 minutes! This is our bug bear, because when we are trying to run a small business, it is laborious paperwork such as this that wears us out and uses up valuable work time.

Our strong recommendation is that if you want to encourage small business to employ apprentices, you need to provide a much more user friendly system for making the claims.

Kind regards,

Paul & Alison
for
Paul King Plumbing