The federal government has established a taskforce to crack down on fraud in the National Disability Insurance Scheme, warning that organised crime will seek to exploit the system without a greater deterrent.

On Tuesday the social services minister, Dan Tehan, announced the taskforce of 100 personnel who will work with the Australian federal police, suggesting that while known instances of fraud were “minimal” the risk to the scheme was “quite large”.

Tehan noted the government spent $8bn last year on the scheme, which provides participants with funding for disability support services, a sum that will rise to $22bn in 2021-22.

“We want to ensure that that money goes to those people who need it, people with a disability,” he told reporters in Canberra. “We do not want that money going, in particular, to organised criminals who will seek to exploit, sadly, any system that the government puts in place.”

In June, Fairfax Media reported that in two dozen cases across four states, operators who were banned from providing daycare because their businesses were fraudulent or unsafe had set up ventures to provide services through the NDIS.

The law enforcement and cyber security minister, Angus Taylor, said that historically “large pots of money like this one in the NDIS have attracted organised crime”.

Taylor said the taskforce would use “big data” to “look for unusual transactions and clusters of transactions” to detect fraud.

“We, as Australians, believe we should be as generous [as possible] to those genuine claimants for the NDIS,” Taylor said. “Whenever people [commit fraud] they are ripping off the genuine claimants, and they are ripping off every Australian taxpayer.”

The AFP deputy commissioner of operations, Neil Gaughan, said that “there has been some fraud that’s taken place, but it is minimal”.

“There are ongoing investigations in relation to that particular activity, and obviously I’m not in any position to comment on that.”

Gaughan warned that committing fraud against the commonwealth was punishable by “severe penalties through court processes”.

The NDIS already operates a hotline for people to report suspected fraud, defined as “dishonestly obtaining a benefit or causing a loss by deception or other means”.

The NDIS advises participants to report behaviour such as falsification of invoices, provision of services by unqualified staff, provision of services without a participant’s consent, under-servicing a participant or claiming for supports that were never provided and charging unreasonable amounts for travel.

Labor’s acting social services minister, Linda Burney, said the government “should have acted sooner to protect taxpayers and people with disability who rely on the NDIS from fraud”.

Burney cited a 2016 Australian National Audit Office report that classified the NDIS as a high fraud risk because of its reliance on third parties to provide information to support payments.