In #SenateEstimates right now they're discussing Robodebt & a spate of suicides, this public servant is saying that because suicide victims are no longer here, by definition, then any causality cannot be proven between the Robodebt and the suicide.— Bee (@BelindaJones68) February 21, 2019
I shit you not.#auspol pic.twitter.com/M2Fqb9JS55
Showing posts with label #notmydebt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #notmydebt. Show all posts
Saturday 2 March 2019
Tweet of the Week
Labels:
#notmydebt,
Centrelink
Tuesday 26 February 2019
Sad statistics are generated by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's war on the poor & vulnerable
Liberal MP for Cook Scott John Morrison has been a
Cabinet Minister since 18.9.2013, was Minister for Social Services from
23.12.2014 to 21.9.2015, then Treasurer from 21.9.2015 to 26.8.2018 and now Prime
Minister of Australia since 24.8.2018 – these are the sad statistics he leaves
in his wake.
The Australian, 21 February 2019:
As Department of Human
Services secretary Renee Leon faced heated questioning about the controversial
“robodebt” program — which averages reported income and generates debts to
current and former welfare recipients — she said it is not known whether people
have taken their own lives due to the program.
“There is not an
elevated death rate among the cohort who have received a debt notice. It’s not
to say we are not troubled that people die,” Ms Leon said…
Greens Senator Rachel
Siewert said the numbers are particularly troubling because 663 people out of
the 2030 had “vulnerability indicators” attached.
Of the 2,030 people who died after receiving a Centrelink
Online
Compliance Intervention letter (‘robodebt’ ) which was generated sometime
between July 2016 to October 2018:
102 were aged
16-25 years;
327 were aged
26-35 years;
347 were aged
36-45 years;
466 were aged
46-55 years;
536 were aged
56-65 years;
251 were aged
66-80 years; and
1 was aged 81-100
years.
By gender 637 of these welfare recipients were Female and 1,393 Male.
“If death rates remained
similar throughout the period July 2016 - October 2018 ... approximately 6% of
all deaths of 16-35 year olds in Australia occurred for people who were subject
to Centrelink #robodebt compliance.” [Dr Ben Eltham on Twitter,
22 February 2019]
BACKGROUND
Gilbert Sullivan QC weiting in the Herald
Sun, 21 February 2019:
The Model Litigant
Policy of the Commonwealth is a direction issued by the Attorney-General under
the Judiciary Act.
The claims reported to
have been made by Centrelink are said to target 1.5 million people and aim to
claw back $4.6 billion in what are alleged to be overpayments of welfare.
The claims date back to
2010 and Centrelink demands the repayment of what it alleges to be overpayments
caused by the understatement of income; but it knows very well that it is
unable to prove these claims.
Centrelink has destroyed
its records and is entirely dependent on information obtained from the
Australian Taxation Office. It divides the gross annual income obtained in this
way by 26 to calculate what it terms an “apportioned actual income”.
It then proceeds to claim
the difference between the fortnightly income declared by the payee and the
apportioned actual income as an understatement by the recipient which it then
claims as a debt.
It is only by sighting
pay-slips or bank statements that the accuracy of the declared fortnightly
income can be verified. Centrelink’s claims rest on it proving that the
fortnightly income was falsely declared.
It can only succeed if
it can prove this on the balance of probabilities. The ATO information on its
own is worthless and needs a point of comparison in the form of contemporaneous
records. Annual income does not translate into fortnightly income.
The absurdity of this
methodology is obvious.
A full-time student in
2010 on a youth allowance may well have had a part-time job to support their
studies. Some weeks they may have earned, say $150, other weeks nothing.
They may have entered
the work force full-time in the last two months of the financial year and
earned say, $8000.
Dividing the yearly
income by 26 cannot establish a dishonest understatement for the weeks the
student earned $150 or nothing. Without the contemporary records, no
understatement can be proved.
This methodology is in
breach of model litigant obligations in a number of respects.
First, the mathematical
basis underpinning it is invalid and known to be so by Centrelink; and the
maintenance of a claim known to be invalid is a fundamental breach of the
obligation to act as a model litigant.
Second, to imagine that
casual employees retain pay slips from 2010 is ludicrous; many of the employers
from that time no longer exist and it is inconceivable that anyone can produce
pay-slips.
Further, while some bank
records are obtainable, they are archived and expensive to obtain. Placing the
onus on a recipient to procure bank statements is yet a further breach of model
litigant obligations.
There is no reason why
Centrelink could not obtain these records by subpoena or otherwise.
Furthermore, the actions of Centrelink reverse the onus of proof which, of
itself, is a breach of model litigant obligations.
MammaMia, 21 February 2019:
“It was demeaning,
embarrassing, and if it wasn’t for my son… I considered suicide.”
“It was dehumanising. I
had only lost my husband months before… I was grieving.”
These two sentences
represent how two women, from two different walks of life, in separate states
felt – when they received a Centrelink
debt notice.
Or more exactly what
happened when they tried to deal with the fallout of a
Centrelink debt notice……
The Centrelink letters
are sent out through an automated system. In the old system, it equated to
about 20,000 a year, but thanks to a new system in 2016 – it’s generating
20,000 letters a week.
Gabriella* received one
of those letters just last year.
She received it when she
was trying to come to terms with the death of her husband who had died in a
boating accident a few months before.
She was left with two
young children trying to work out how to move on with life.
She had never received
anything from Centrelink, she hadn’t needed to. But Centrelink had sent her
$13,000 in weekly increments, and they wanted their money back.
“The stress… I was
already dealing with enough… I knew I didn’t owe them money,” she told Mamamia.
Turns out Centrelink had
been sending her money that she hadn’t applied for – which had been bouncing
back for months.
“I made a phone call
first, they realised they’d made a mistake. But she [the person on the phone]
couldn’t fix it.”
She was given a
different number.
“I spent hours on the
telephone waiting for them to answer [to help]. It’s impossible to get
through,” explained Gabriella.
So instead, she was
forced to take a day off work and go into the Centrelink office itself.
“She looked at me like I
was lying,” Gabriella told Mamamia, of the moment she explained her
story – yet again.
Gabriella is most
frustrated at the time and effort she had to put in to fix this wrong. A wrong
that was made by an automated letter, and which cost her a days’ wage, and
almost cost her $13,000.
“I am grieving, but I am
pretty stable… my head is pretty OK. But there are people who get these letters
and they are not OK,” said a teary Gabriella.
“I am actually in the
mental health industry, so I am probably more equipped than a lot at noticing
triggers in myself. But what if I wasn’t?
“My situation never
should have happened, if there had been a human being looking at my account
they would have realised it was bouncing back.”
“It was dismay. It was a
shock to the system. It is scaremongering, they don’t explain anything, and
it’s very… dehumanising,” she said of her experience..........
Monday 11 February 2019
Morrison & Co off to the Australian High Court to defend the indefensible - Centrelink's robo-debt
The
Guardian, 6
February 2019:
Centrelink has
now wiped, reduced or written off 70,000 “robo-debts”, new figures show, as the
government’s automated welfare compliance system scheme faces a landmark court
challenge.
Victoria Legal Aid on
Wednesday announced a challenge to the way Centrelink evaluates whether a
person owes a welfare debt under the $3.7bn system. It will argue the “crude
calculations” created using tax office information are insufficient to assess a
person’s earnings and, therefore, are unlawful….
Victoria Legal Aid’s
court challenge was also welcomed by the Australian Council of Social Service
chief executive Cassandra Goldie, who said the scheme was a “devastating abuse
of government power…..
Alternative Law Journal. Emeritus Professor of Law (Syd Uni)
Terry Carney, Robo-debt
illegality: The seven veils of failed guarantees of the rule of law?, 17
December 2018:
The
government's on-line-compliance (robo-debt) initiative unlawfully and
unethically seeks to place an onus on supposed debtors to ‘disprove’ a
data-match debt or face the prospects of the amount being placed in the hands
of debt collectors. It is unlawful because Centrelink, not the supposed debtor,
bears the legal onus of ‘proving’ the existence and size of any debt not
accepted by the supposed debtor. And it
is unethical because the alleged debts are either very greatly inflated or even
non-existent (as found by the Ombudsman), and
because the might of government is used to frighten people
into paying up – a practice rightly characterised as a form of extortion. How
could government, accountability avenues, and civil society have enabled such a
state of illegality to go publicly unidentified for almost 18 months and still
be unremedied at the date of writing?
This
article suggests the answer to that question lies in serious structural
deficiencies and oversights in the design and operation of accountability and
remedial avenues at seven different levels:
1. In a lack of standards to prevent
rushed government design and introduction of machine learning (‘smart’) systems
of decision-making;
2. In a lack of diligence by
accountability agencies such as the Ombudsman or Audit Office;
3. In a lack of ethical standards of
administration or compliance by Centrelink with model litigant protocols;
4. In a lack of transparency of the
first of two possible tiers of Administrative Appeals Tribunal review (AAT1),
resulting in a lack of protections against gaming of review by way of agency
non-acquiescence or strategic non-contestation;
5. In a lack of guarantees of
independence and funding security to enable first line Legal Aid or community
legal centre/welfare rights bodies (CLC/WRC) to test or call out illegality in
the face of thwarting of challenges by Centrelink settling of potential test
cases;
6. In a lack of sufficient pro-bono
professional or civil society capacity to mount ‘second line’ test case
litigation or other systemic advocacy; and
7. In tolerance, especially in some
media quarters, of a ‘culture’ of political and public devaluing of the
significance of breaches of the rule of law and rights of vulnerable welfare
clients.
It
is argued that a multifaceted set of initiatives are required if such breaches
of legal and ethical standards are to be avoided in the future.
Why
is it clear that robo-debt is unlawful?
The
pivot for this article is not so much that Centrelink lacks legal authority for
raising virtually all debts based on a robo-debt ‘reverse onus’ methodology
rather than use its own information gathering powers – for this remains
essentially uncontested. Rather
it is extraordinary that this went unpublicised and uncorrected for over two
years. So first a few words about the illegality as it affects working age
payments such as Newstart (NSA) and Youth allowance (YA).
Robo-debt
is unlawful because Centrelink is always responsible for ‘establishing’ the
existence and size of supposed social security debts. This is because the
legislation provides that a debt arises only if another section creates
a debt, such
as one based on the difference between the amount paid and the amount to which
a person is entitled. And
because Centrelink bears a ‘practical onus’ to establish this. If Centrelink
cannot prove up a debt from its own enquiries or information supplied to it,
the status quo (no debt/lawful receipt of payments) applies. This
has been the law since 1984 when the full Federal Court decided McDonald. Unless
the alleged debtor is one of the rare employees who had only a single job paid
at a constant fortnightly pay rate, Centrelink fails to discharge this onus
when its robo-debt software generates a debt by apportioning total
earnings reported to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) from particular jobs to
calculate average earnings. Robo-debt treats fluctuating earnings as if
that income was earned evenly at the same rate in each and every fortnight.
Mathematically this is wrong because an average for a fluctuating
variable never speaks to its constituent parts. And it is
the actual income for constituent fortnights that as a matter of law
is crucial for calculating the rate of a working age payment such as NSA or YA.
Read the full
article here.
Monday 24 December 2018
How the Turnbull & Morrison Coalition Governments suspended legal principle and stooped to extortion in order to pursue vulnerable welfare recipients
In July 2016
the Department of Human Services (DHS) - Centrelink launched a new online
compliance intervention (OCI) system for raising and recovering debts.
Its aim was
to raise up to $1 billion dollars allegedly owed by welfare recipients.
This
compliance intervention became known colloquially as robo-debt.
Current
Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison was federal treasurer for the first two years of the
ongoing robo-debt scheme.
During this
time the suicide of welfare recipients being pursued for so-called debt
recovery began
to be reported.
Since 2016 only a small number of welfare recipients have brought their robo-debts before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for adjudication. It has reportedly set aside 34 per cent of these robo-debts (or one in every three) and varied another 2,4 per cent.
Most welfare recipients don't have the resources to fight these alleged debts.
The
Guardian, 18 December 2018:
Centrelink’s “robo-debt”
system is a form of illegal extortion allowed by failings across a “plethora”
of democratic and legal institutions, according to a former member of the
administrative appeals tribunal.
Prof Terry Carney, a
long-serving member of the AAT, has penned an extraordinary attack on the
institutional failings that allowed the
robo-debt program.
It’s the second time
Carney, who helped oversee the writing of Australia’s social security laws, has
used academic journals to condemn the
system as illegal this year.
Carney’s last
paper said robo-debt involved the enforcement of “illegal” debts that
in some cases were inflated or nonexistent, an allegation that was forcefully
rejected by the Department of Human Services. Hank Jongen, the department’s
spokesman, said at the time that the department “strongly refutes any claims
that it has conducted its compliance activities in a manner which is
inconsistent with the legislation”.
This time, Carney used a
piece in the Alternative Law Journal to map out the numerous shortcomings that
allowed the system to come into being and operate for 18 months without
challenge.
“The pivot for this article is not so much
that Centrelink lacks legal authority for raising virtually all debts
based on a robo-debt ‘reverse onus’ methodology rather than use its own
information gathering powers – for this remains essentially uncontested,” he
wrote. “Rather it is extraordinary that this went unpublicised and uncorrected
for over two years.”
Centrelink has long used
a system of automated data-matching to detect discrepancies in income reported
by welfare recipients, to detect and claw back overpayments. But it introduced
significant changes from July 2016, reducing human oversight and expanding the
system considerably in a bid to recover more debts and improve the budget. The
new system effectively
shifted the onus onto the welfare recipient to prove they owed no debt
to the government.
The system spat out
letters to individual welfare recipients as soon a discrepancy was detected in
their reported income to Centrelink and records held by other agencies, like
the tax office.
A flawed process
was used
to calculate their debt if they did not respond or could not produce
evidence of their previous pay, which involved averaging out their yearly
income across all 26 of Centrelink’s fortnightly reporting periods. The process
often led to the false assumption that a welfare recipient had worked across an
entire year and was ineligible for social security, thereby creating a debt.
Carney argues the rushed
design of what he described as a “machine-learning budget ‘savings measure’”
trumped good design standards. He says inquiries by the auditor general and the
commonwealth ombudsman into the system had failed to consider whether it was
raising debts on a lawful basis.
Carney also argues that
Centrelink, by pursuing debts raised through the controversial “income
averaging” technique, has failed to adhere to ethical administration. He says
Centrelink has continued to use this method, despite knowing AAT rulings that
it is invalid…….
The privacy safeguards
in the first tier of the AAT mean that most legal challenges against welfare
debts are not publicised, he writes. That means that “rulings overturning
Centrelink reasoning remain hidden from the public”…..
TERRY
CARNEY AO, Emeritus Professor, University of Sydney, Centre for Health
Governance, Law and Ethics, 2018:
* Alternative
Law Journal, Robo-debt illegality: The seven veils of failed guarantees of the rule of law?
* Australian
Public Law, Robo-Debt
Illegality: A Failure of Rule of Law Protections?
* UNSW Law
Journal Forum, The
New Digital Future For Welfare: Debts Without Legal Proofs Or Moral Authority?
* University of
New South Wales Law Journal, Vulnerability:
False Hope For Vulnerable Social Security Clients?
Thursday 13 December 2018
Centrelink's 'robodebt' headed to the Australian Federal Court?
9 News, 10 December 2018:
Centrelink’s robo-debt
recovery scheme was intended to seek out and destroy debts, but instead it’s
thrown more than 200,000 Australians into financial turmoil.
Now, Victoria’s former
head prosecutor, QC Gavin Silbert, is lending his voice and fighting back
against the controversial system which aims to claw back up to $4.5 billion in
welfare overpayments.
“I think it’s illegal
and I think it’s scandalous. In any other situation, you’d call it theft. I
think they’re bullying very vulnerable people,” Mr Silbert told A Current
Affair.
“If debts are owed to
the public purse they should be paid, they should be pursued. These are not
such debts,” he said.
He’s teamed up with
Melbourne-based solicitor Jeremy King to take a pro bono case to the Federal
Court which, if successful, could derail the robo-debt scheme and see thousands
of debts wiped.
“I hope this would set a
precedent to show that the way this robo-debt scheme had been rolled out is not
in accordance with the law and all of the other debts that have been sent out
to people are not in accordance with the law,” Mr King said....
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
2 December 2018:
Gavin Silbert, QC, who
retired as the state's chief crown prosecutor in March, has accused the
Department of Human Services of ignoring its legal obligations and acting like
a bully towards some of the nation's most vulnerable people.
A potential legal
challenge could have significant implications for future enforcement of the
robo-debt program, which aims to claw back up to $4.5 billion in welfare
overpayments with more than 1.5 million "compliance interventions".
Mr Silbert became embroiled
in the dispute when someone he knew was issued with a demand to repay a debt of
$10,230.97, which the department claimed was overpaid by Centrelink between
2010 and 2013.
He has provided pro bono
advice and helped prepare correspondence to the department, which repeatedly
asked for an explanation on how the debt was calculated.
However, the
department's compliance branch has ignored nine letters between May and
November 2018 that requested additional information. Last week, it made threats
to impose interest charges on the original debt.
"Other than the
bald assertion that I have a debt, I have never received any details of how the
debt is alleged to have arisen or anything which would enable me to verify or
understand the demand made of me," Mr Silbert's client wrote on June 7.
In another letter, Mr
Silbert's client wrote: "There is not a court in the country that will
uphold your demands for interest in the absence of fundamental details of how
the amount is alleged to have arisen."
The dispute escalated
further when the department engaged debt collection agency Dun &
Bradstreet, which threatened Mr Silbert's client with a "departure
prohibition order" that would prevent him travelling overseas.
Mr Silbert is keen to
launch Federal Court action to test the legal basis of the robo-debt program
and the government's apparent unwillingness to provide particulars.
"I'm itching to get
this before a court," he told Fairfax Media.
He said legislation that
regulates data-matching technology requires the department to "give
particulars of the information and the proposed action" before it can
recover overpayments.
The robo-debt program,
introduced by the Coalition government, calculates a former welfare recipient's
debt by taking a fortnightly average rather than discovering the exact amount
that was claimed.
The department was
forced to concede it was no longer in possession of the original claims made to
Centrelink by Mr Silbert's friend, after he made requests under
freedom-of-information laws.
Labels:
#notmydebt,
Centrelink,
law,
welfare payments
Saturday 19 May 2018
Tweets of the Week
Today DHS told the senate, that so far:— NotMyDebt (@not_my_debt) May 8, 2018
Robodebt has cost $276 million to administer.
And... Robodebt has 'recovered' $279 million.
While they can separate forecast savings for newspaper headlines, apparently it's not possible to do that with actual savings.#notmydebt pic.twitter.com/Q6M6NaY09p
DHS was asked how many robodebts are awaiting reassessment. They failed to answer. We've heard from people waiting months.— NotMyDebt (@not_my_debt) May 9, 2018
So far 652,898 reassessments have been initiated.
30,953 debts have changed in value or been wiped. That's 30,953 debt notices that were wrong.#notmydebt pic.twitter.com/LJd3WxDJV4
DHS are including 'prevented debts' in their savings from robodebt.— Sarah Masting (@sarah_masting) May 8, 2018
What happens if a company in the private sector banks a possibly avoided future liability as a cash asset?
See: Blue Sky Alternative Investments - majority of board resigned
Time for robodebt resignations? pic.twitter.com/jsdQVM4NAa
Thursday 12 April 2018
The only Australians who do not recognise the cruel farce that is 'robo-debt' are right-wing politicians, ideologues and the just plain ignorant
“It is trite
maths that statistical averages (whether means or medians) tell nothing about
the variability or otherwise of the underlying numbers from which averages are
calculated. Only if those underlying numbers do not vary at all is it possible
to extrapolate from the average a figure for any one of the component periods
to which the average relates. Otherwise the true underlying pattern may be as
diverse as the experience of Australia’s highly variable drought/flood pattern
in the face of knowledge of ‘average’ yearly rainfall figures. Yet precisely
such a mathematical fault lies at the heart of the introduction from July 2016
of the OCI machine-learning method for raising and recovering social security
overpayment debts. This extrapolates Australian Taxation Office (‘ATO’) data
matching information about the total amount and period over which employment
income was earned, and applies that average to each and every separate
fortnightly rate calculation period for working-age payments.” [Terry
Carney AO, UNSW Law Journal, Vol 42 No 2, THE NEW
DIGITAL FUTURE FOR WELFARE: DEBTS WITHOUT LEGAL PROOFS OR MORAL AUTHORITY?,
p2]
The
Canberra Times,
5 April 2018:
The Coalition
government's "robo-debt" program has been unlawfully raising debts
with welfare recipients, wreaking "legal and moral injustice", a
former administrative appeals tribunal member has said.
Emeritus professor of
law at the University of Sydney Terry Carney, who was on the Administrative
Appeals Tribunal for 40 years and was its longest serving member until
finishing in September, has weighed into the debate over the controversial debt
collection method saying the Department of Human Services has no legal basis to
raise debts when a client fails to ‘disprove’ they owe money.
While Professor Carney
urged it be made to comply with the law, the DHS rejected his comments, saying
its Online Compliance Intervention program was consistent with legislation.
"Robo-debt" -
the subject of a Commonwealth Ombudsman report and a Senate inquiry recommending sweeping reforms to the
program - was at the centre of a maelstrom of controversy last year and remains
loathed by critics calling for change….
Writing in the UNSW Law
Journal last
month, he said that despite the DHS' stance it remained responsible for
calculating debts based on actual earnings, not assumed averages.
“Centrelink’s
OCI radically changed the way overpayment debts are raised by purporting to absolve Centrelink from its
legal obligation to obtain sufficient information to found a debt in the event
that its ‘first instance’ contact with
the recipient is unable to unearth information about actual fortnightly earnings.
As noted by the Ombudsman, the major change was that Centrelink would ‘no
longer’ exercise its statutory powers to obtain wage records and that the
‘responsibility’ to obtain such information now lies with applicants seeking to
challenge a debt. Writing a little later, the Senate Community Affairs
References Committee challenged this, contending that
6.13 It is a basic legal principle that in order to
claim a debt, a debt must be proven to be owed. The onus of proving a debt must
remain with the department. This would include verifying income data in order
to calculate a debt. Where appropriate, verification can be done with the
assistance of income support payment recipients, but the final responsibility
must lie with the department. This would also preclude the practice of
averaging income data to manufacture a fortnightly income for the purposes of
retrospectively calculating a debt. …” [Terry Carney AO, UNSW Law Journal, Vol
42 No 2, THE NEW
DIGITAL FUTURE FOR WELFARE: DEBTS WITHOUT LEGAL PROOFS OR MORAL AUTHORITY?,
pp3-4]
Wednesday 7 February 2018
CENTRELINK ROBO-DEBT: the nightmare continues
Given that the Turnbull Government continues to
apply a faulty algorithm to Centrelink
debt collection in 2018, private debt collectors remain financially incentivised
to aggressively chase debts which may not actually exist, former welfare
recipients may still receive debt recovery fee demands and government intends
to expand collection to other groups/forms of declared income, while Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge
is yet to fix the problems with ‘phone wait times, perhaps a reminder of what
the title Online Compliance Intervention actually
hides and what the alternative term robo-debt describes……..
Cory Doctorow writing in Boing
Boing, 1 February 2018:
In
a textbook example of the use of big data to create a digital poorhouse, as
described in Virginia Eubanks's excellent new book Automating
Inequality, the Australian government created an algorithmic,
semi-privatised system to mine the financial records of people receiving
means-tested benefits and accuse them of fraud on the basis of its findings,
bringing in private contractors to build and maintain the system and collect
the penalties it ascribed, paying them a commission on the basis of how much
money they extracted from poor Australians.
The
result was a predictable kafkaesque nightmare in which an unaccountable black
box accused poor people, students, pensioners, disabled people and others
receiving benefits of owing huge sums, sending abusive, threatening debt
collectors after them, and placing all information about the accusations of
fraud at the other end of a bureaucratic nightmare system of overseas phone-bank
operators with insane wait-times.
GillianTerzis writing in Logic,
a magazine about technology, 2017:
Automation
is dehumanizing in a literal sense: it removes human experience from the
equation. In the case of the robo-debt scandal, automation also stripped humans
of their narrative power. The algorithm that generated these debt notices
presented welfare recipients with contrasting stories: the recipients claimed
they’d followed the rules, but the computer said otherwise.
There
were few official ways to explain one’s circumstances: twenty-nine million
calls to Centrelink went unanswered in 2016, and Centrelink’s Twitter account
seems explicitly designed to discourage conversational exchange. One source of
narrative resistance is notmydebt.com.au, a website run entirely by volunteers
that gathers false debt stories from ordinary Australians so that the “scandal
can't be plausibly minimised or denied.”
Over
time it was revealed that many of these debts were miscalculated or, in some
cases, non-existent. One man I’d read about was on a government pension and
saddled with a $4,500 bill, which was revised down months later to $65. Another
recipient, who was on disability as a result of mental illness, had a debt
notice of $80,000 that was later recalled. A small proportion of recipients
were exclusively in contact with private debt collectors and received no
official notice from Centrelink at all.
Soon
it emerged that social services were a lucrative avenue for corporate
interests: this year’s Senate inquiry revealed that some private agencies
tasked with recouping debts were working on a commission basis, pocketing a
percentage of the debts they had recovered for the government regardless of
their validity. (All debt notices issued by private agencies were eventually
rescinded after government review in February 2017.)
The
methodology of the algorithm itself was riddled with flaws. It calculates the
average of an individual’s annual income reported to the Australian Tax Office …..and
compares it with the fortnightly earnings reported to Centrelink by the welfare
recipient. All welfare recipients are required to declare their gross earnings
(income accrued before tax and other deductions) within this fourteen-day
period. Any discrepancy between the two figures is interpreted by the algorithm
as proof of undeclared or underreported income, from which a notice of debt is
automatically generated.
Previously,
these inconsistencies would be handled by Centrelink staff, who would call up
your employer, confirm the amount you received in fortnightly payments, and
cross-index that figure with the one calculated in the system. But the
automation of the debt recovery process has outsourced authority from humans to
the algorithm itself.
It’s
certainly efficient: it takes the algorithm one week to generate 20,000 debt
notices, a process that would take up to a year if done manually. But it’s not
a reliable method of fraud detection. It’s blunt, unwieldy, and error-prone. It
assumes that variations in the data sets are deliberate, and that recipients
have received more than what they are entitled to. What’s more, the onus is on
the welfare recipient to prove their income has been reported correctly and
that the entitlements they have received are commensurate within twenty-one
days.
Yet,
as many critics have noted, this income-averaging method is porous. It fails to
accurately account for the fluctuating fortunes of casual or contract workers,
which often results in variations between the two figures. There’s also no way
for the algorithm to correct for basic errors in the system’s database. It
cannot yet discern whether an employer’s legal name has been used instead of
its various business names—it treats them as separate entities, and therefore
separate sources of income—or whether conflicting reports are caused by basic
mistakes, such as spelling errors or typos. These seemingly small distinctions
are ones that only a human could make. It’s no wonder, then, that conservative
estimates of its error rate hover at 20 percent……
Yet
the irony of stigmatizing welfare recipients is that better-off Australians are
major beneficiaries of social spending. The Australian writer Tim Winton notes
that the country’s middle class has “an increasing sense of entitlement to
welfare,” which is “duly disbursed largely at the expense of the poor, the
sick, and the unemployed.” These include tax concessions on contributions to
“superannuation,” which are funds designed to help Australians save for their
retirement. Such concessions are distortionary: they’re levied at a flat rate
of 15 percent, rather than at a progressive rate according to one’s income,
which means their benefits are reaped overwhelmingly by the rich.
The
Australian Bureau of Statistics calculates that nearly one third of these concessions
are claimed by the top 10 percent of income earners in Australia. Then there
are policies like negative gearing, a tax concession that allows you to claim a
deduction against your wage income for losses generated by any rental
properties you own. (Australia and New Zealand are the only countries in the
world to hold such a policy.) In addition, Australian homeowners are entitled
to a capital gains tax discount of 50 percent once the property is sold.
Critics
have argued that the combination of these two policies only serves to fuel
investor speculation, entrench housing unaffordability, and lock first-time
home buyers out of the market. But it’s easier to attack the poor than to tax
the rich.
Commonwealth Ombudsman, Centrelink’s
Automated Debt Raising And Recovery System: A Report About The Department Of Human
Services’ Online Compliance Intervention System For Debt Raising And Recovery, April 2017:
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
In
July 2016 the Department of Human Services (DHS) - Centrelink launched a new
online compliance intervention (OCI) system for raising and recovering debts.
The OCI matches the earnings recorded on a customer’s Centrelink record with
historical employer-reported income data from the Australian Taxation Office
(ATO). Parts of the debt raising process previously done manually by compliance
officers within DHS are now done using this automated process. Customers are
asked to confirm or update their income using the online system. If the
customer does not engage with DHS either online or in person, or if there are
gaps in the information provided by the customer, the system will fill the gaps
with a fortnightly income figure derived from the ATO income data for the
relevant employment period (‘averaged’ data).
Since the initial rollout of the
OCI, the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s office has received many complaints from
people who have incurred debts under the OCI. This report examines our concerns
with the implementation of the OCI, using complaints we investigated as case
study examples.
We acknowledge the changes DHS has made to the OCI since its
initial rollout. The changes have been positive and have improved the usability
and accessibility of the system. However, we consider there are several areas
where further improvements could be made, particularly before use of the OCI is
expanded. We have made several recommendations to address these areas......
Planning
and risk management
In
our view, many of the OCI’s implementation problems could have been mitigated
through better project planning and risk management at the outset. This includes
more rigorous user testing with customers and service delivery staff, a more
incremental rollout, and better communication to staff and stakeholders. DHS’
project planning did not ensure all relevant external stakeholders were
consulted during key planning stages and after the full rollout of the OCI.
This is evidenced by the extent of confusion and inaccuracy in public
statements made by key non-government stakeholders, journalists and
individuals.
A
key lesson for agencies and policy makers when proposing to rollout large scale
measures which require people to engage in a new way with new digital channels,
is for agencies to engage with stakeholders and provide resources for adequate
manual support during transition periods. We have recommended DHS undertake a
comprehensive evaluation of the OCI in its current form before it is
implemented further and any future rollout should be done incrementally.
Centrelink website, 5 February 2018:
If you don’t pay your
debt by the due date, we may ask the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to send
us your tax refund. If we do we’ll send you a Recovery of your Centrelink debt
letter.
If you aren’t repaying
your debt over time or if we haven’t agreed to extend the payment time, we may
also:
* add an interest charge
to your debt
* refer your debt to an
external collection agency
* reduce your income
support payments to help pay the amount owing
* recover the amount
from your wages, other income and assets, including money you may hold in a
bank account
* refer your case to our
solicitors for legal action
* issue a Departure
Prohibition Order to stop you from travelling overseas....
The rate of interest we apply to your
debt is consistent with the current rate applied by the ATO to tax debts.
Friday 3 November 2017
So how much Centrelink client debt was not debt at all in 2015-16 & 2016-17?
Australian Minister for Social Services Christian Porter is quick to point the finger but often very slow with concrete answers, so it is always a boon when annual departmental reports are published.
In September 2017 the latest DSS annual report was published.
Although carefully disguised in the wording "waived or written off"; by adding the 2016-17 annual report's financial statements together with the previous year’s annual report, one finds that the admitted amount of false client debt generated by Centrelink’s disastrous attempt to match Australian Taxation Office data with its own client records could possibly be as high as $264.645 million over a two financial year period.
As challenging a Centrelink debt letter was a distressing and often extremely difficult obstacle course for many welfare recipients, these hundreds of millions of dollars represent the determination of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians to fight back against false claims made on their wallets by government and the besmirching of their reputations.
On 26 October 2017 The Canberra Times reported that; Human Services official Jason McNamara told a Senate estimates hearing that in 202,000 cases where the department finalised the debt amount, 49,000 welfare recipients who received letters since the 'robo-debt' program started in July 2016 were found to owe nothing.
That means that 25.25% of these 202,000 debt notices were false claims as the Centrelink client was found to owe nothing.
In July and August this year Centrelink sent out a total of 114,000 debt letters.
At least est. 28,785 of these letters will probably represent a false claim of debt.
I hope all Centrelink clients who received one of these letters are querying each and every one.
On 26 October 2017 The Canberra Times reported that; Human Services official Jason McNamara told a Senate estimates hearing that in 202,000 cases where the department finalised the debt amount, 49,000 welfare recipients who received letters since the 'robo-debt' program started in July 2016 were found to owe nothing.
That means that 25.25% of these 202,000 debt notices were false claims as the Centrelink client was found to owe nothing.
In July and August this year Centrelink sent out a total of 114,000 debt letters.
At least est. 28,785 of these letters will probably represent a false claim of debt.
I hope all Centrelink clients who received one of these letters are querying each and every one.
BACKGROUND
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