information that might be useful about Passport funding.
- Family Services Toronto apparently no longer sends out annual confirmations of funding levels (unless those have changed). if you're not sure, you have to call them to confirm the amount. No annual paperwork is being processed, it seems.
- If you use My Direct Plan, you have to manually add your annual funding into your account at the start of the fiscal year (March 1): it is not automatically updated. Log on to My Direct Plan, go to Account Settings, scroll down to Fund Settings, and enter the annual amount (the rate for KM is 0.01). Note that no matter how tempting it is to enter the amount you actually need, the amount entered here won't actually be granted to you: once you've exhausted the funds allocated, you won't be able to submit additional expenses, no matter what MDP says is your account balance. If you have a submission for the new fiscal year, I'd suggest just going ahead and putting in an amount (say $1000) so you can submit receipts while you're waiting.
- Funding contracts do not appear to be automatically sent out. If you haven't received/signed it, you should probably ask FST to send it to you. Note that they apparently don't keep track of who has or has not signed that contract:despite how much they emphasized that in the funding changes a few years ago, but you should probably still ask for it in case someone actually, you know, checks.
- If you are using funds to pay a worker, the worker has to sign up for an account and you can't actually submit a specific claim for expenses related to that worker until they acknowledge that it's valid, by responding to an email they get sent from MyDirectPlan.
- The MyDirectPlan support people are great, but they don't know anything about your funding.
- I'm having intermittent issues with messages saying that my submission did not pass verification (it seems to keep forgetting who I am) but when I check again later it seems to be OK.
If you would like to complain about any of this nonsense, I have the contact information for someone who is the interim director of FST and who was responsive the last time I complained.
