The Centrelink robo-debt fiasco is one of the bigger examples of Budget mis-management under this Coalition Government.
Treasurer Scott Morrison promised Australians that Centrelink’s new data matching software would deliver more “accurate and appropriate income testing” by substituting manual checking of data for a computerised algorithm. It would also supposedly “cut red tape and ensure that mistakes are minimised”, and raise $661 million for the Budget.
In actual fact, the opposite occurred. The ATO data has been found to be incompatible with Centrelink’s data, promoting Centrelink to issue thousands of debt notices to people who owe them no money.
Today, the Commonwealth Ombudsman has issued an unflattering report on the robo-debt saga, claiming the debt recovery system lacks transparency and has treated some customers unfairly. From The ABC:
The Department of Human Services was swamped with complaints after it began sending automatically generated debt notices to welfare recipients after checking their tax records…
One in five people sent debt notices did not owe any money, but [Acting Commonwealth Ombudsman Richard] Glenn said he agreed with the Department that these were not “errors” and the number of mistakes did not increase under the new system.
However, he listed a large number of problems plaguing the system and said improvements were needed to meet “minimum administrative law requirements”.
“There were deficiencies in (the department’s) service delivery and communication to customers and staff when implementing the system,” he said.
“These issues affected the quality of decisions made by the [automated system].
“Many of these problems could have been reduced through better project planning, system testing and risk management.”
The Government has used data matching to identify welfare fraud for decades but automated the process in mid-2016 in a bid to save money, greatly reducing human oversight…
The Ombudsman said the letters were unclear and did not include crucial information, such as the right contact phone number for Centrelink…
The report found many welfare clients didn’t know they had to call the compliance helpline and so flooded Centrelink’s general customer service line instead.
But Centrelink staff did not fully understand how the new system worked because they had not been trained properly.
Scott Morrison was also behind last year’s embarrassing Census debacle, which saw millions of Australians fail to complete the survey online amid heavy user traffic and accusations of hacking, and cost taxpayers up to $30 million. No wonder voters no longer trust him.
