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In the lead-up to Christmas, tens of thousands of Australians started receiving threatening debt collection notices from Centrelink and its agents. Coming from a government that couldn’t run an online census, you can probably guess what happened. Ben Eltham explains just in case you can’t.
The worried emails and social media posts starting piling up in my inbox in December.
The problem? Centrelink. The government’s monolithic welfare agency is sending nasty letters to people out of the blue.
The government is calling it a “new online compliance system.” I prefer the catchy phrase “robo-debt.”
In the week before Christmas, thousands of Australians received letters or communications from Centrelink, or its appointed debt collectors.
Some received scary letters, informing them of debts in the thousands of dollars. Some logged into MyGov, the government’s creaking online information portal, to try and make a Medicare claim, only to discover a message that they owed thousands.
For others, the news came in a more threatening form: dozens of missed phone calls, culminating in threatening answering machine messages from debt collectors. Once again, the message was terrifying: they owed Centrelink thousands for an over-payment they knew nothing about.
For many, the debts that they owed to Centrelink were utterly mysterious. They had reported their income correctly at the time. There was simply no evidence that they had ever been over-paid.
The robo-debt dragnet began back in September. It has already generated considerable community anguish and concern. 169,000 robo-debt notices have already been sent.
We’ll call one Centrelink client we spoke to ‘Sally’. Her experience is indicative of what some people are going through.
“For about two weeks, I was struggling with some pretty serious anxiety as a result of daily automated phone messages and texts telling me I owed a debt. Some did not even identify themselves.
After a while, I typed the debt collectors’ name into a Google search, assuming it was some sort of phishing scam and found others saying it was on behalf of Centrelink. I called Centrelink, who confirmed that I had a debt and needed to pay the collectors directly as it was now out of their hands.
They had already taken my last tax return to help pay the debt.”
We spoke to another client, who we’ll call ‘Luke.’
“I have received a debt recovery notice from Dun and Bradstreet on behalf of the Department of Human Services, asking to be paid immediately! This is very distressing as I received this notice on Friday 22nd December, just before Christmas.
The issue is still unresolved as I spoke with a Centrelink staff person (after an hour wait). This person asked me to hold (again) while she spoke with somebody from Debt Recovery, but I was not able to speak with them, as they were ‘extremely busy’. They took my mobile number and told me they will be calling in the next 14 days. I was told there was nothing else I could do!
I have all my statements and Centrelink correspondence. The dates do not correlate and the amount is ridiculous.
Luke is in remission from an aggressive cancer. He was briefly on sickness allowance several years ago.
One of the most insidious aspects of the Centrelink dragnet is that people who have been issued with false robo-debt notices are no longer allowed to leave the country.
New Matilda spoke to one client, who we’ll call ‘Angus.’
They used the usual crude calculation without regard for casual work: annual income from the ATO averaged over a whole year. I corrected that, but am still awaiting new assessment.
My stress concerns the travel ban: I’m due to leave for Germany on January 10.
Angus is travelling to Germany on a one-way ticket to take up a job at a university there. “I can’t get any information,” he told us. “It’s very stressful.”
In the past week, New Matilda has spoken to more than 30 Centrelink clients who claim that they have been issued a debt notice in error.
The most common issues for Centrelink clients that we spoke to were simple and glaring errors of data, like incorrect names for employers, or mismatched annual and fortnightly earnings.
One Centrelink client, ‘Julie’, told us that “they simply took my annual income for that year and averaged it over all fortnights (which would have made me ineligible) instead of the actual dates of payment/employment.”
Many others echoed her complaint:
“They averaged out my annual income over the full 52 weeks, meaning I was ‘overpaid’ some weeks. I called and spent two hours on the phone, the guy prefaced our chat by saying ‘Centrelink is never wrong, you’re going to have to pay’.
Once I emerged from the chaos of the first four weeks, I discovered that the debt had already been escalated to a collection agency. They are consistently hassling me and have informed me they can ‘garnish’ my wages and take the money from my bank account.”
Like the government’s last data debacle, the 2016 Census, it’s clear that there are massive IT failur