How I had my #NotMyDebt waived *Apologies for the long story*

At the beginning of October I received my debt letter totalling $789.53 for the three months that I was claiming Centrelink benefits between early Nov 2014 and mid Feb 2015. I now know the figure was relatively small compared to those I’ve since seen in the 1000s of dollars, but at the time the story hadn’t blown up to the extent that it now has and I didn’t know anyone else who had received a similar letter so it instantly became the biggest drama I didn’t need in my life right now.

Even though I was initially freaking the fuck out over this debt letter, I also knew I’d done everything by the book and never knowingly incorrectly declared my income so should not have incurred a debt. I visited my local branch to try and get an explanation as to what I’d done, and they put me on the phone to the payment integrity department. If they were able to identify my mistake and I was clearly in the wrong I’d happily wear the debt. But I wasn’t going to just accept it at face value.

Payment Integrity told me to just log into the Centrelink website and amend my details. I had to fix the dates of the job I started that allowed me to stop claiming Centrelink (it claimed I was working that job from the beginning of the 2014/15 financial year when I only started in Feb 2015). Once that was amended and I supplied payslips as well as a letter showing the start date for my new job, I awaited the response from Centrelink.

Said response eventually arrived, showing no change to my debt figure, but it did result in what I’ve since called the ‘Screenshot of Confusion’ which I posted to Twitter. This screen shot not only claimed I had incurred a debt because “I had declared $1129.04 but had in fact earned $1129.04”, it also said at the top of the page “The amount you owe Centrelink is $789.53” yet at the bottom stated “The total amount you owe Centrelink is null.” WTF?

I called Centrelink’s compliance department, hoping to clear up some of this confusion. While I didn’t get the straight answers I was hoping for, the person from the compliance team did suggest that I may have been instructed to submit the wrong pay slips with my first review. I had been told to submit the pay information for the job I started in Feb 2015, presumably because their details had shown I’d worked there for the entirety of the 2014/15 financial year, when I should have submitted the payslips for the job I lost in November 2014. Once I fixed that up I waited for the result of my second reassessment.

A week or so later my review came back and my debt had been revised down to about $476. It was still higher than I expected it to be, but I figured that was about as good as it was going to get so I set up a payment plan of $50 a fortnight starting at the end of December.
It wasn’t until about a week or two later that the Centrelink debt story really started to pick up steam on social media and eventually the mainstream media. I was finally getting an insight into how big this story was becoming. I kept a close eye on it, but still decided to leave my revised debt as is. Like I said, I didn’t want to poke the bear any further, plus my debt was comparatively small and I was fortunate enough that I wasn’t really going to miss $50 out of my pay each fortnight for a few months.

But a couple of weeks ago I changed my mind. I was equally buoyed by the confidence I gained after posting the Screenshot of Confusion on Twitter and angered by an article I read that claimed Centrelink branch staff were forbidden from helping anyone. So I called the Compliance department once more to find out how they came to my revised figure of $476. The lady I spoke to was terrific; she looked over my documents with the precision of a forensic analyst and after a good 30-45 minutes of looking over everything came to the decision that the only debt I should have incurred was the $41 that was paid in the overlap between my last Centrelink payment and the first payment of my new job. And because that $41 was below $50, they would waive my debt. I was informed though that if they decide to un-waive my fine at a later time that I would be required to pay back the $41.