this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Centrelink should consider waiving 100,000 debts that may be unlawful, ombudsman report finds (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Watchdog says Services Australia and the Department of Social Services ‘did not act promptly’ to address the issue and calls on agencies to apologise

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This whole agency and department needs to be completely overhauled. I'm fairly certain services australia are still breaking many laws in their day to day operations.They need to be put into crisis mode, have business as usual mode suspended, auto-approve payments, hire a fucktone more staff (permanently) and fix shit. I would have thought Shorten would have the political will to do something about this but he's been so disappointing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure if anything needs to be "fixed". They just need more staff. They've laid off tens of thousands of staff in recent years and as far as I know it hasn't even cut costs.

The department has spent a fortune paying the remaining staff penalty/overtime rates to fill in staff shortage gaps and a lack of staff has massively increased the workload of the staff because problems are easier to deal with if you get on top of them early.

For example when my kid was born, someone in the department stuffed up his registration. It took over a year to fix that simple mistake and created a huge amount of work for the department. In the old days, when the department had enough staff, they would've fixed it in five minutes.

Robodebt has been just as big a stuff up as my little story. It cost $600 million to run robodebt, which is almost as much money as they "recovered" and it's looking like most of the money recovered will be paid back to whoever they took it off with over a hundred million in interest on top of that. What a mess.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Why even bother fixing it. Shut it down, move to UBI, plus a new - less cunty - outfit for disability payments etc.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I feel disgusted by the whole robodebt thing, and I can't even imagine how people were devastated by it.

But I swear, if it was me, I'd be looking at suing the shit out of them. Surely there would be lawyers that would take this on for a percentage of the winnings?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

It's all happening over again. Check "robotax".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What do you mean "should consider"!?!? They're unlawful, strike them down...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The problem is they don't know which ones are unlawful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Just assume they all are - I'd be willing to bet it would be the cheaper option than paying staff to sift through the reports then refunding the legit ones.

Burn it all down and start fresh.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yep I agree. And I expect that's what will happen... but the sensible thing isn't to just make an arbitrary decision, they need to get this right and seek advice — preferably external advice, since the department itself is dysfunctional and that's what they've done.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Oh, we can't do that - let's spend 100 million making sure we don't pay anyone a dollar more than we have to. You know, to cut costs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Ah. Okay... Gotcha

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

More than that, press criminal charges since they're unlawful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In its second report, titled Accountability in Action, the ombudsman called on the agencies to apologise for “decision delays, and for historic unlawful calculations”.

The ombudsman said Services Australia and DSS “have a responsibility to identify and assess, in a timely way, the impact historic unlawful calculations had on customers, and develop a fair and reasonable remediation strategy that considers all possible options”.

In some cases the payslips relied on by Services Australia to calculate welfare debts don’t align with the fortnightly income reporting periods.

The ombudsman found that under the process of “apportionment”, welfare recipients’ employment income was spread across two or more fortnightly periods, which are used to calculate entitlement to Centrelink payments such as jobseeker.

The ombudsman’s report reveals the reason behind delayed redress is that the agencies are still “settling a final legal position about how to lawfully calculate employment income before they recommence assessing cases”.

The ombudsman said the agencies had “not taken appropriate steps” to assess the impact, develop a remediation strategy, pause debts, and explain the issue to welfare recipients.

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