Centrelink debacle that’s slugged thousands of Aussies with unfair debt is the latest in a string of disasters in which technology has let us down - with devastating consequences.
We have become a nation where screw-ups are the new normal.
Almost exactly a year ago, Centrelink was in the middle of another storm, when it was forced to apologise for a New Year’s computer glitch that incorrectly told 73,000 families they were in debt.
When Family Tax Benefits claimants checked their accounts online, they were wrongly shown to owe money, with one mother mistakenly charged more than $700.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics then paid IBM $9.6 million to run the bungled 2016 Census because its own systems were antiquated and unreliable. The national survey was a massive failure, with the website going down for 40 hours and a Senate Committee inquiry finding “significant and obvious oversights” in its delivery.
And in early December, around the time Centrelink ramped up distribution of bogus debt letters to Aussies looking forward to the festive season, the ATO’s online system crashed after a failure in a hardware storage solution provided by Hewlett Packard.
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The problems for Centrelink go a long way back, with reports 60 per cent of calls were going unanswered back in May.
The IT glitches should have emerged when automation was introduced in July, but the agency pushed ahead with sending out its inaccurate December letters.
“This looks like it was broken from the start,” IT expert Justin Warren told news.com.au. “It looks the system was developed in-house, and it’s gone into a more automated mode where human oversight is removed. The burden of fixing that is now on people receiving notices. That’s weird.”
Mr Warren, who has worked for Telstra, Australia Post, IBM and ANZ, said that if any other company was made aware of a 20 per cent error rate, a program would be delayed. He points to basic errors — dates not lining up, salaries spread over a year despite months of unemployment, incorrect addresses in the system and the computer thinking one employer with varying names was two. Yet that data is available: up-to-date addresses and unvarying employer ABNs are held by the ATO.
“I don’t know how it made it out of testing,” he said. “If there were this many problems with it, you’d pull the plug. There’s no crisis management going on.”