Written by staff writer.
The NSW Security Licensing & Enforcement Directorate (SLED) director has apologised to clients over difficulties caused by the agency’s migration to the new NSW whole-of-government licensing system.
“The ‘journey’ has been far more difficult than anticipated,” said Cameron Smith on LinkedIn last week. The agency oversees the private security industry in Australia’s most populous state (and, from September 1, the tattoo industry). It issues licences and conducts training, probity assessments and compliance audits.
The NSW government began rolling out a single digital platform in 2021 to serve the licencing needs of its various agencies and departments. The platform uses software dubbed Amanda, developed by Calytera, which authorities the UK, US, and Canada also use for its broad licencing applications.
The NSW government wants to use the platform, renamed Licence NSW, to replace the state’s formerly disparate licensing systems.
“Licence.NSW improves the customer experience in standardising licensing processes across regulatory agencies,” says a NSW government website. “It is the preferred end-to-end digital licensing platform that enables full licence lifecycle management including workflow and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) function.”
Two years after its soft introduction, SLED was also one of the first NSW government agencies to move its entire licensing infrastructure into the whole-of-government system, a transition Smith says was beset with multiple system bugs and missing critical functionality.
He says among the problems were thousands of incorrect licence renewal reminders being automatically emailed by the system, including to individuals who have not held licences in many years.
In addition, SLED could not process applications to add subclasses to existing security licenses, replace licences, or issue new licences to mutual recognition applicants. He says there were constant problems with online licence renewals and licence card production, including licensees being unable to change their address and other contact details online.
Smith says the release of new system code and functionality in late July solved most, if not all, problems. “We’ll be working hard to get through the backlog of affected applications as soon as we can,” he wrote. “I’m very sorry for the impact these system issues have had on so many prospective, current and former industry members.”
SLED has been processing new security licences on the Licence NSW platform since July 2022, largely without incident. However, in May 2023, SLED moved its entire trove of licence records and management onto the platform. By late May, the agency admitted it was experiencing problems with the migration. By mid-June, the migration was complete, but problems persisted.
On June 20, SLED said new and renewing security licence applications submitted throughout May were experiencing processing delays owing to “technical problems” associated with the move.
Smith won some praise for owning up to the migration difficulties, which another agency was responsible for managing. There are also some unconfirmed reports people lost jobs because they could not get their licences renewed or granted because of the migration issues. “We’re very disappointed that these system issues have understandably caused so many of you to lose confidence in SLED,” said Smith.
