“Centrelink is letting me die,” reads graffiti scrawled on the wall of the disabled toilet at a branch in Sydney’s inner west.
That’s the perception of some Australians trying to negotiate a benefits system that appears seriously flawed, where letters slamming people with bogus debts of thousands of dollars were widely distributed over the Christmas period.
Long queues snake around the room, while others sit looking bored on grey seats, staring at the grey walls, yet several help desks are empty.
Alberto Bolognini, from Leichhardt, was blunt. “The system sucks,” he told news.com.au. “I pay $700 a week in taxes and when you come for help, they drive you through hell and back.”
The accusations Centrelink’s automated system is failing keep pouring in, with Aussies wrongly targeted thanks to bungled data matching with the Australian Taxation Office. The errors include claims people had two jobs because their employer has slightly different names, that they were working all year when they were unemployed for months and using old addresses for inaccurate debt notices when current ones are held by the ATO.
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An employee who works in compliance for the agency told news.com.au that “95 per cent of debts are wrong”. He said the Government was “cutting corners, calculating debts fast is their goal, and it’s just wrong, staff morale is so bad everywhere.”
He added: “Centrelink gets a data match from the ATO, the customer is asked to supply pay slips, if they can’t then the income is ‘annualised’ making the debt incorrect.
“Not too long ago, we conducted reviews the right way. We wrote to the employers to get a break down of the income and assessed it in the correct fortnights, but in the Government’s eyes this took too long so they adopted this dodgy incorrect system.
“In the unearned income teams, we may get a match for bank accounts, usually these reviews are for age pensioners, we are told to only address the match data and not look at other assets they may have like shares, real estate, etc, effectively only doing half the job. As you can see, the whole process is wrong.
“The Government should be held accountable.”
Those worst affected are the most vulnerable in society — pensioners, people with disabilities and those with mental health issues, some of whom have spoken of suicide after having debt collection agencies put on their case.
And the mistakes are proving hard to fix thanks to clogged phone lines, overstretched staff and difficulties in overriding the online system. That was painfully evident in the frustration expressed by the Aussies news.com.au spoke to at a packed Sydney office.