A Centrelink compliance officer has broken ranks to describe the government’s crackdown on welfare debts as grossly unfair, saying its new automated compliance system is flawed and overly harsh on those on sickness benefits.
The government continues to insist there are no flaws with its compliance system, which is being used to retrieve debts from hundreds of thousands of Australia’s lowest paid and most vulnerable.
The system relies on an automated data-matching process to detect discrepancies between fortnightly income reported to Centrelink and annual pay information held by the tax office, a comparison that has been criticised as too crude.
Once a discrepancy is detected – currently occurring at a rate of about 20,000 cases a week, compared with 20,000 a year previously – welfare recipients must prove they were entitled to the welfare benefit, or pay the debt.
The Centrelink compliance officer, who asked for anonymity, told Guardian Australia the system was error-prone but that most customers were paying debts without checking them first. The source said of the hundreds of cases they had reviewed, only about 20 (at a “generous estimate”) turned out to be genuine debts.