A Federal Court judge has locked down the internal spreadsheets the National Disability Insurance Agency uses to cut participant entitlements when claimants have already received compensation elsewhere.
Justice Charlesworth ruled on May 13, 2026, that the agency could keep its "compensation reduction amount" calculator confidential, after Amanda Pett won her appeal against an earlier Administrative Appeals Tribunal decision that had backed the cuts to her entitlements.
The compensation reduction amount, or CRA, is what the agency subtracts from a participant's NDIS supports when they have already received money for the same injuries. In Pett's case, the agency provided her with three spreadsheets showing the calculation, drawing on her settlement details, actuarial data on her life expectancy and estimated lifetime support needs, and the scheme's historical records.
In their working form, the files contain live formulae and the agency's internal methodology - material the agency told the court had not previously been made available to the public, a position the judge accepted.
Pett had tried to use modified versions of the same spreadsheets to argue the calculator should produce a nil result. She selected "yes" in a drop-down menu, which changed the values in some of the formulae and reduced the CRA to nil. The Tribunal found neither side's version of the spreadsheets was useful and decided the matter without them.
After the appeal was resolved, the agency went back to court asking for ongoing suppression. It leaned on a range of arguments: the formulae were not in the public domain, the Privacy Act and the NDIS Act would be breached, and other scheme participants might misuse the tool.
Charlesworth J knocked most of those down. The privacy argument failed because Pett's personal details had already been aired openly across the proceedings - suppressing them in the spreadsheets while leaving them in the judgment would, in the judge's words, "create an absurdity." The "other participants might misuse it" argument also failed: inconvenience is not a ground for suppression under the Federal Court of Australia Act 1976.
What worked was narrower. The Tribunal had already imposed a confidentiality order over the same spreadsheets, and nobody had challenged it. Lifting the Federal Court's interim suppression without a replacement would have created a clash between the two regimes. "If a suppression order is not made, there is the potential that the administration of justice will be brought into disrepute," the judge wrote.
The orders cover both the .xlsx working files and the .pdf versions Pett filed. The judge accepted the formulae could not be practically stripped out, so the whole documents stay sealed. Anyone with a sufficient interest - including any media member - can apply to have the orders lifted.
For insurers and claims professionals, the ruling is a small but useful marker on how internal claims-calculation tools can be protected when they surface in litigation, particularly where another tribunal has already ordered confidentiality.
