Housing assistance agency—recurrent expenditure (non-employee expenses)

An organisation or organisational sub-unit that is responsible for the provision of housing assistance to clients.

Defining Agency is extremely important for data collection, as it is the level at which most data are collected in the community services area.

Regardless of the way in which an organisation is funded, an agency is the level of the organisation responsible for service provision to clients. In some instances one organisation will have more than one or many agencies.

Sometimes agencies may contract out or broker the assistance required by their clients to other service providers (such as a crisis accommodation agency paying for hotel room hire). Although the agency may not directly provide the assistance in these cases, the agency paying for the assistance to clients is considered responsible for that assistance and should be able to report on those clients and the assistance they receive.

Collection and usage attributes

Different collections define Agency differently according to their context and varying need for information on the different levels of organisations providing community services. Individual data collections will therefore need to further specify what an agency is for their collection purposes.

In the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) National Data Collection, SAAP agencies are defined as 'The body or establishment which receives a specified amount of money (SAAP funds) to provide a SAAP service...The agency is the level at which data are collected'.

In the Home and Community Care (HACC) Data Dictionary however, a HACC agency is defined as 'A HACC funded organisation or organisational sub-unit that is responsible for the direct provision of HACC funded assistance to clients'.

In Children's services, agency most closely corresponds to the definition of Service provider 'The entity (individual, agency, organisation, body or enterprise) that provides the service(s)'.

At this point in time the National Community Services Data Dictionary definition of agency is of necessity quite broad. As agency is generally the level at which data are collected, and there are different needs for data collection in different areas, a more precise definition would be too narrow to encompass all community services data collections.

Source and reference attributes

When fees charged for goods and services are offset against recurrent expenditure, the result equates to final consumption expenditure in the ABS national accounts framework.

For more explanation of and details on expenditure types, see the November 1998 Version of the ABS ETF of the GFS Classifications.