Alan Tudge, the minister responsible for Centrelink, has promised to stick with the agency's beleaguered automatic debt recovery system, saying the new system is getting results.
Hack has spoken to a number of welfare recipients who claim they were unfairly served with a debt notice, despite doing nothing wrong.
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The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) represents members who work at Centrelink. They said their members told the union that most automatically-generated claims aren't right.
"We have members in Centrelink who've been tasked with reviewing cases through this scheme saying in almost every case the poor customer ends up owing nothing, or just a fraction of the debt claimed," Assistant National Secretary of the CPSU, Michael Tull, said.
That's not a minor discrepancy but a clear sign of a failed system."
But Centrelink disputes that claim, and so does the Minister.
They say that 20 per cent of the time customers who get a letter saying there's a discrepancy are able to clear it up straight away.
"That is the system working," Alan Tudge said.