Staff inside the Centrelink unit responsible for income reviews and eligibility assessments warned officials from the Department of Human Services that automated data matching would lead to incorrect debts being issued to low-income and vulnerable Australians, an insider has revealed.
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"They don't care about average Australians, they don't care about their customers or their staff," the woman said.
"We told them 'shit', that's not going to work when they explained how the computer was going to do the work and said that it was going to misrepresent people's income and lead to incorrect debts going out, but they just told us 'computers and data can't be wrong'.
"They wanted to save a shitload of money and weren't interested in hearing what we thought about it."
The staffer said longstanding cultural issues inside Centrelink and the department had contributed to the problems, with a view by senior bureaucrats that poorly developed online systems could be opened to the public and fixed later if faults emerged.
"There's a view that we should just keep moving, get customers off the phone and it is very frustrating for staff working inside DHS," she said.
"They deliberately make it hard for people to contact Centrelink to report problems and register for benefits. If you deter a few thousand people from registering for Newstart, even if they are eligible, it will save a lot of money for the government."