All welfare recipients - including people who got student support payments - are subject to the new compliance measures.
Centrelink's new automated compliance system has raised red flags all over the place; discrepancies that critics of the system said would not occur if humans were checking welfare records.
The number of letters has ballooned from 20,000 a year to 20,000 a week.
For some people, the automated system assumed that the welfare they receive in a fortnight is the same across the year - without taking into account that some people work casually or only during certain periods.
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For Joy, the discrepancy hinged on a simple data entry error. (Joy isn't her real name; she's asked Hack not to identify her as her debt is still outstanding.)
Centrelink had two different names for her employer - the full name of the organisation and the well-known abbreviation of its name. The new automated system flagged that Joy was therefore working two different jobs and was owed much less in welfare than she had received.
"If it was a human checking this, they would have looked at it and thought, 'hmm, this is suspicious'," Joy said.
Despite being convinced that the debt is not due to an error on her part, Joy has had to start paying it off.
Failing to do so will "appear to be debt-evading" and will make her life even harder, Joy said.
So she set up a payment plan. Debt collectors rang her and asked her to pay back $900 a fortnight. Joy nearly lost it. There was no way she could afford that.