It doesn’t take a fancy big city lawyer to recognise the fact that Centrelink‘s insane automated debt recovery system was a poorly implemented program that resulted in the unfair targeting of the poor and vulnerable in order to both a) recoup Government debt from low-income earners as a frontline cost cutting measure, and b) continue conservative politics’ life-long quest to render the welfare system irreparably borked in order to justify abandoning it.
The system was plagued with operational issues and countless claims of former Newstart and Austudy recipients being mistakenly forced to hand over information to Centrelink in order for the system to not saddle them with a debt they never incurred.
The Commonwealth Ombudsmen turned its torches onto the system in a report issued earlier this morning, labelling the robo-debt system “not reasonable or fair,” and blasting the Department of Human Services for implementing a system they didn’t fully understand, in turn saddling customer service workers with complaints they weren’t trained to handle.
The 113-page report found that around 20% of people issued with a “request for information” were able to prove they owed nothing at all; meaning around 1 in 5 people the system targeted did not actually have any debt to begin with.
The report also asserted that it was neither “reasonable” nor “fair” to expect people targeted to produce pay-slips and records from as far back as seven years ago in order to avoid being hit with a wrongful debt.
“In our view, this is not reasonable or fair in situations where customers have to collect evidence from several years ago, or where the customer does not have the capacity to obtain the evidence.”
The report went in on the DHS for failing to properly consider the issues such a system – which paired users internal pay info with data collated from the ATO – before implementing it.
“We found there were issues with the usability and transparency of the system. There were deficiencies in DHS’ service delivery and communication to customers and staff when implementing the system.”
“These issues affected the quality of decisions made by the [automated debt recovery system]. Many of these problems could have been reduced through better project planning, system testing and risk management.”
The Ombudsman’s office has accepted that the DHS has since made changes to the way the system operates, asserting that online-based data-matching can accurately calculate any potential debt owed.
The Coalition Government remains steadfast in their assertion that nothing was ever wrong with the system and that everything was working fine, actually.
We’ll see how well that line of talk goes for ’em as their term in power winds on.
Photo: Matt King/Getty.
