Robodebt scheme

• In 1990, the Australian government passed legislation enabling Data Matching for the purposes of verifying incomes of welfare recipients.[17] This legislation detailed how the data held by the Australian Tax Office would be shared with the Department of Social Security (now Services Australia). This sharing of data was to enable identification of people who had likely provided incorrect or out of date information to Centerlink under the Social Security Act 1991[18]
• The legislation covering the use of data matching and issuing of debt included a limitation of 9 cycles per year,[17] with Centrelink drawing on data collected by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) since the Data Matching Act 1990 was passed.
• The process of debt investigation and recovery remained largely unchanged after the 1990 legislation, with minor changes owing to back end systems changing. The core system that was implemented in the 1984 Social Security and Reparation Act remained.[19]
• In 2011, the Gillard Government introduced an automated system to cross-check data between the Australian Taxation Office and Centrelink, in order to "identify individuals who wrongly received welfare payments when their earnings made them ineligible".[20] Proposed by the Minister for Human Services Tanya Plibersek and Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten, these changes were expected to gain "an extra $71 million to the budget".[21][20] Under this system, Centrelink staff manually checked customer records against data provided by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), generating debt notices at an estimated rate of about 20,000 a year.[4][5]

Scott Morrison Minister for Social Services (Dec 2014-Sep 2015)

• In April 2015, measures to create budgetary savings by increasing the pursuit of outstanding debts and investigation of cases of fraud in the Australian welfare system were first flagged by the Minister for Social Services Scott Morrison and the Minister for Human Services Marise Payne,[22] and formally announced by the Abbott Government in the 2015 Australian federal budget.[23]
• In 2015, the Department of Human Services conducted a two-stage pilot of the Robodebt scheme, targeting debts of selected welfare recipients that were accrued between 2011-2013.[24]
• Following the 2015 Liberal Party Leadership Spill and 2016 Australian federal election, the Turnbull government implemented an overhaul of the federal welfare budget in an effort to crack down on Centrelink overpayments believed to have occurred between 2010 and 2013 under the Gillard government.[4][5]
• In July 2016, the manual system began to be replaced with the Online Compliance Intervention, an automated data-matching technique with less human oversight, capable of identifying and issuing computer-generated debt notices to welfare recipients who had potentially been overpaid.[3][4] The new system was fully online by September 2016.[24]

Christian Porter, Minister for Social Services (September 2015 - December 2017)

• In December 2016, Minister for Social Services Christian Porter publicly announced the implementation of this new automated debt recovery scheme – which was given the colloquial name 'robodebt' by the media[8][25] – was estimated to be capable of issuing debt notices at a rate of 20,000 a week.[4][26]

Allegations levelled against the scheme by the media, former and current welfare recipients, advocacy groups, politicians and relatives of welfare recipients include:

• Welfare recipients suicide after receiving automated debt recovery notices for significant sums.[33][34]
• Debt notices issued to deceased people.[35]
• Issuing debt notices to disability pensioners.[36]
• Revelations that debt notices were issued to 663 "vulnerable" people (people with complex needs like mental illness and abuse victims) who eventually died.[37]

After the Turnbull government implemented the robodebt scheme, many recipients of debt notices filed complaints with the Commonwealth Ombudsman.[24] This led to the agency investigating the scheme, with the final report and recommendations delivered in April 2017. The recommendations from the ombudsman are as follows:[24]

• That the Department of Human Services (DHS) "should reassess those debts already raised by the scheme where the 10% recovery fee was applied automatically, and manually reassess whether the application of the fee was appropriate, taking into account the customer’s personal circumstances, including the existence of a reasonable excuse".
• That the DHS should " make further improvements to improve the clarity of the initial debt notices and give customers better information so they understand the information and can properly respond to it".
• That the DHS should provide a message to welfare recipients that "clarifies that if they do not enter their income information, their ATO income will be averaged evenly across the relevant period and this may result in a debt".
• That the DHS should notify welfare recipients that " debts based on averaged ATO income may be less accurate than debts based on actual income, especially if their income was fluctuating or intermittent".
• That the DHS should "further assist welfare recipients to gather evidence with which to effectively respond to debt notices", such as:
  • "By taking into account the potential cost of obtaining bank statements, and use its powers to request the evidence directly from the financial institution
  • "When person contacts DHS for assistance in relation to a debt notice, DHS should use its information gathering powers to assist the person to obtain income information from a third party, such as a former employer or bank, if, despite genuine and reasonable attempts to do so, the person has been unable to obtain income information; or it would be unreasonable, in the circumstances of their case, to expect them to obtain such information.
  • "By including clear guidelines about the process for obtaining employment income evidence".
• That the DHS should " deliver a number of changes to improve its service delivery and communication to those who've received debt notices".
• "That a greater number of vulnerable debt notice recipients should be offered a staff assisted intervention and provided with additional assistance and support".
• "Before further expansion of the robodebt scheme, the DHS should undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the scheme in its current form, and give further consideration as to how to mitigate the risk of possible over-recovery of debts."

The Robodebt scheme was the subject of a Senate committee inquiry in 2017.[9] The inquiry had a number of findings and made a number of recommendations,[38] including:

• "That a lack of procedural fairness is evident in every stage of the program, which should be put on hold until all procedural fairness flaws are addressed".
• "That the Robodebt scheme disempowered people, causing emotional trauma, stress and shame".
• "That the Department of Human Services has a fundamental conflict of interest – the harder it is for people to navigate this system and prove their correct income data, the more money the department recoups".
• "That the Department of Human Services should resume full responsibility for calculating verifiable debts (including manual checking) relating to income support overpayments, which are based on actual fortnightly earnings and not an assumed average; and provide those issued debt notices with the debt calculation data required to be assured any debts are correct".

The scheme was again the subject of a Senate committee inquiry, begun in 2019.[10][11] Initially meant to report its findings in December 2019, this deadline has been extended twice, with the Senate committee due to deliver its report on 19 August 2020.[10] During senate hearings in July 2020, former head of Services Australia Kathryn Campbell initially stated that she did not know what Robodebt was. She later denied that the scheme had led to welfare recipients committing suicide after receiving debt notices, despite allegations from Centrelink staff and the family members of welfare recipients who took their own lives.[33]