hadn't done anything wrong and it left me absolutely drained

The month after I received a debt notice was an absolute rigmarole at the hands of the government.

The entire situation began when I was contacted by Recovery Corp informing me that Centrelink was collecting a debt for $907, and would I like to pay it over the phone. It was the first contact I had had with any Centrelink or Centrelink-affiliated body since I started my full time job nearly four years previously. I believed I was well and truly done, happily working away as a full time employee.

I was taken aback by the call from a debt collection agency, and even considered the fact that it could be a scam. They told me that they had sent a letter to an address that I hadn’t lived at since 2012 (so clearly not a scam), and were going to send out a new letter to my current address.

I contacted Centrelink... eventually. At the time I was in the most painful part of recovering from a tonsillectomy, and wanted nothing more than to sleep. Instead, I spent nearly four hours on the phone that afternoon, voice hoarse and throat bleeding, to question why I suddenly owed Centrelink over nine hundred dollars. I got almost no answers and cried at the end out of pain and frustration.

Over the next couple of weeks I spent hours of both personal and work time trying to get in contact with the right people (both at my old employer and at Centrelink). Hours spent getting the right pieces of paper, getting the right people to talk to on the phone, trying to upload documents to the awful MyGov website, endlessly repeating my name, DOB and address to their representatives… all just so I could prove that I did not under-report my earnings.

Meanwhile, I had to pay off RecoveryCorp IN FULL. I'm not a high income earner. Nine hundred dollars is a lot of money. Money that could have been of more use to me as groceries, or rent, or simply accruing interest, instead of sitting in some debt collector's bank account due to Centrelink's incompetence.

Nobody called, nobody emailed. Just a letter apparently, sent to an address four years out of date. And then some pushy debt collector calls me out of nowhere. I realise that the department is probably understaffed and overworked, but I still expect better from my government.

After all that, I got a letter sent to me revising the amount from $906.79 to $0.00. Awesome! Finally some good news. Even better, on the new spreadsheet detailing how the amount was originally calculated is says that Centrelink in fact UNDERPAID me by over four hundred dollars.
I spoke with a very curt representative who informed me that it was my fault, that I should have correctly reported my earnings and that I am actually not entitled to that money.

I would have thought that if the department can hound me, get bullying debt collectors to call me, or coerce me into giving them money they were not owed, that maybe the debt would also flow the other way once they had corrected the spreadsheets. I wanted to know why I have had to spend so many hours and literally give over nine hundred dollars to their department for doing no wrong, yet when Centrelink suddenly gets it right it’s ‘oh no, you can’t have that money you’re entitled to, you should have contacted us within thirteen weeks’? No answer.

I became absolutely exhausted in dealing with Centrelink, trying to figure out the situation. I hadn't done anything wrong and it left me absolutely drained.