A merged enrolment and attestation form is a $50,000 accounting error waiting to happen. The Ministry of Education’s auditors treat it as prima facie evidence of non-compliance, triggering immediate funding recovery.
43% of all 20 Hours ECE funding errors are caused by attestation failures. The Office of the Auditor-General identified the core problem: services could not provide evidence a child wasn’t double-dipping for funded hours elsewhere. This isn’t an administrative oversight. It’s a direct breach of funding conditions under the Education and Training Act 2020. The Ministry recovers every dollar.
The Audit Trigger
The auditor’s first move is to isolate the 20 Hours ECE attestation from your enrolment pack. They are looking for a standalone, parent-signed document that explicitly states: the child is not claiming concurrent hours at another service; hours are capped at six per day and twenty per week; and the service will not charge fees for those hours. If this declaration is buried in a general terms & conditions clause, merged with a fee schedule, or missing a signature, you fail. The audit trail is broken. The funding claim for that child, from the date of enrolment, is invalid. Multiply that by your roll.
The Regulatory Hook
The mandate is absolute. Funding can only be claimed from the day a parent completes and signs the separate attestation; no retrospectivity is permitted. This is a condition of funding under the Education and Training Act 2020. The physical storage requirement for the original signed attestation isn’t archival trivia. It’s a forensic control. It allows auditors to match ink signatures to funding claims. A discrepancy between the attested schedule and actual attendance is a mandatory reportable event to the Ministry. Charging a fee for a 20 Hours ECE claim is not a pricing strategy. It’s a clawback trigger.
Director Action Point
“Show me the last three enrolment files. Point to the exact, separate page where the parent attested to the 20 Hours ECE conditions, and demonstrate how we verify a child isn’t concurrently enrolled for funded hours elsewhere.”