Record of Meeting
National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS)
WA Advisory Group Meeting (Meeting No: 9)
Date: 9 August 2006
Venue: 1st Floor Meeting Room,
VGO Building
18 Mount Street
Perth WA 6000
Attendees: Geoff Couper, David Elson, Andrew Hamilton, Stephen Johnson, Gavan Kelly, Peter Lakos, Craig Mariano, Mark McLinden, Judith Pinczuk, Bruce Roberts (Chair) and Sue Taylor.
Apologies: David Clark, Steve Fathers, Gary Gregory, Valerie Haskins, Craig James, Chris Martin, David Parry, Amy Sullivan, John Syminton and Jane Toomer.
Withdrawn: Troy Dennis and Peter Weymouth.
- Housekeeping Matters
1.1 Minutes of the previous meeting were accepted with a change requested to the reference to the preferred option for certificates of title. Once the change was made the minutes were accepted as being an accurate record.
1.2 A copy of the issues log was handed out at the meeting and comments requested from the attendees. It was agreed that the issues need to be reviewed in detail at the next meeting. Any comments or changes to the issues log should be directed to the project team ().
1.3 BR gave an overview of the progress of all Jurisdictions in regards to their readiness for NECS. It was noted that by the end of next meeting, WA would have reviewed all key NECS documents.
2. Review of NGA Document – Governance Arrangements
2.1 General Comments.
· BR recommended that the document be considered in whole and not review it chapter and verse. The document was opened to general discussion. No major feedback was received at the meeting however any comments should be directed back to the NECS project team.
· BR indicated that NECO has commissioned a consultant to undertake a review of the governance arrangements. These consultants will be travelling around to all Jurisdictions and discussing the arrangements with this forum and other individual groups (eg. WA Law Society) as required.
· BR indicated that the governance consultancy document that was issued at the Adelaide conference will placed on the DLI website for the group’s information.
3. De-brief of Adelaide Conference
3.1 National Office Update.
· NECS National Office (NECO) gave an update on progress being made in the proposed review consultancies. Three of the reviews (ie. Governance Review, Risk Review and Regulatory Review) have been commenced with the identification of an appropriate consultant. These reviews are expected to be complete by February 2007. The fourth review that involves the review of the Victorian system has not yet been commenced since a suitable consultant has not yet been identified. It is expected that this final review will be completed by July 2007.
Due to the late start of the reviews the overall NECS schedule appears to be 6 months behind schedule. The consultants involved in these reviews will be coming to Perth to gather input to their studies. As such, they will be meeting with this group but will also be available to meet with other groups (eg. AIC and WA Law Society).
· This meeting will be reviewing consultant’s documents as they become available. The frequency of the meetings will be determined by the progress in finalising the reviews.
3.2 NECS Readiness Planning.
· The conference agreed that there should be no further readiness activity until the reviews have been completed and in the interim, NECO will be working on national uniformity issues which have already been identified.
· The outcome of the reviews will influence the ‘go / no go’ decision for NECS. At this stage, it appears that this decision will be made in December 2007. At this point in time, there will be a full pilot implementation of NECS within Victoria to a limited user base (ie. ANZ and WBC).
· Victoria is also undertaking a review of the legal framework that supports the implementation of NECS. The outcomes of this exercise will feed into the NECO regulatory review.
· NECO indicated that work is due to commence on a funding model review. This review will undertake a cost analysis of NECS usage (eg. transactional costs) and should be completed within the next 6 months.
3.3 Review of Governance Document.
· The consultants address the meeting and outlined the approach to the study that they were going to take. The broad steps being:
i. Desktop review.
ii. Web review of different models (nb: NECS will be a company with solely government ownership).
iii. Benchmarking.
iv. Review against Australian standards.
v. Workshop / questionnaires.
vi. Evaluation of results.
vii. Final report with recommendations.
3.4 National Uniformity Discussion.
· NECO agreed that a position paper needs to be developed on the 10 key topics that have been identified to date. The key issues being:
i. Accreditation of certifiers.
ii. Collection of fees.
iii. Development of system rules.
iv. Verification of client identity procedures.
v. Templates required identity verification.
vi. Templates required for client authorisation.
vii. Instrument tasks to be provided for NECS.
viii. Use of certificates of title.
ix. Wordings of instrument certifications.
x. Rules and procedures for acceptance and rejection of lodged instruments.
The meeting agreed that there needs to be a common set of rules nationally that will support the implementation of NECS. BR to provide a copy of his notes for circulation to this group for their information.
· NECO also indicated that a separate review will be formed to develop a national position on certificate of titles.
4. General Issues
· There was some discussion on the timings of projects that DLI are planning to undertake to upgrade key applications such as SmartPlan. CM indicated that the initial analysis activities for these systems will commence in December 2006. These reviews will proceed independent of activities with NECS however the analysis and design will allow for NECS compatibility.
These minutes have been reviewed by the committee and it has been agreed that they reflect a true record of the meeting of the NECS Steering Committee.
______
Bruce Roberts
Chair – NECS Steering Committee
___ / ___ / ___