Extract from The Guardian
Advocates for older Australians will seek assurances from Centrelink
about the government’s plans to use the controversial automated debt
recovery system to save roughly $1bn from the aged pension budget.
Charts released last week as part of the midyear economic and fiscal outlook show the government believes it can save $1.1bn from expenditure on the aged pension over the four years to 2019-20, primarily by “expanding and extending data-matching activities with the Australian Taxation Office”.
Aged pensioners are already being caught up in the debt recovery system, including leading foetal alcohol syndrome researcher and Australian of the Year finalist Janet Hammill, who says she was wrongly issued a $7,600 debt.
The Council on the Ageing, the peak group for older Australians, said it had received few complaints about the process so far.
But the COTA chief executive, Ian Yates, said he planned to meet with the Department of Human Services to seek assurances that older Australians will not be put in an unfair position.
“We certainly will be talking to the department about the methods that they’d use,” Yates said. “Obviously they have every right to check that people have been paid the aged pension appropriately.
“But what we will be concerned about is the process ... particularly the problems we’ve seen around contacting recipients.”
The Liberal senator Eric Abetz has also weighed into the debate, telling ABC radio in Tasmania that a member of his extended family had been targeted with a bogus debt.
He said the automated system had caused a lot of “unnecessary consternation”, which he said was “something to be regretted”.
“People should not be put into the situation where unfair demands are being made of them,” he said. “Having said that, similarly as a government we do have a duty to ensure that, if people are paid too much under the welfare scheme, then that money should be repaid.”
Abetz was asked whether the social services minister, Christian Porter, and the human services minister, Alan Tudge, were out of touch for insisting there were no problems with the system.
He replied: “Ministers often rely on what the department advises them and clearly the minister has now acknowledged that things need to be changed, and that is where things need to move forward.”
The use of the automated debt recovery system has been plagued by complaints since early December. It has faced sustained criticism for wrongly targeting welfare recipients, and making it difficult for many to properly dispute supposed debts.
The system relies on an automated data-matching process comparing income reported to Centrelink with Australian Taxation Office records.
That data-matching process has been criticised for crudely comparing fortnightly reporting periods with annual income records held by the tax office, and for struggling to identify cases where the same employer has been named in two different ways.
Where the data-matching process detects a discrepancy, letters are automatically sent out demanding an explanation for the difference, which are typically up to six years old. If those letters are not received, or responded to within 21 days, the debt is issued and vulnerable Australians forced to begin repaying.
The human services minister, Alan Tudge, pledged to refine the system on Monday, mainly to ensure the initial letters are being received.
That was characterised by Labor as a backflip, after initial claims from the government that the system was working as it should. Labor’s Linda Burney continued the attack on Tudge on Tuesday, saying he had now taken longer than 21 days to respond to her formal representations to him about the system.
“The minister thinks three weeks is plenty of time for those caught in his robo-debt debacle but not for him to write a simple response, what an outrageous double standard,” Burney said.
Tudge last week told Guardian Australia the debt recovery system was largely being used to recoup overpayments made to youth allowance and Newstart recipients.
Charts released last week as part of the midyear economic and fiscal outlook show the government believes it can save $1.1bn from expenditure on the aged pension over the four years to 2019-20, primarily by “expanding and extending data-matching activities with the Australian Taxation Office”.
Aged pensioners are already being caught up in the debt recovery system, including leading foetal alcohol syndrome researcher and Australian of the Year finalist Janet Hammill, who says she was wrongly issued a $7,600 debt.
The Council on the Ageing, the peak group for older Australians, said it had received few complaints about the process so far.
But the COTA chief executive, Ian Yates, said he planned to meet with the Department of Human Services to seek assurances that older Australians will not be put in an unfair position.
“We certainly will be talking to the department about the methods that they’d use,” Yates said. “Obviously they have every right to check that people have been paid the aged pension appropriately.
“But what we will be concerned about is the process ... particularly the problems we’ve seen around contacting recipients.”
The Liberal senator Eric Abetz has also weighed into the debate, telling ABC radio in Tasmania that a member of his extended family had been targeted with a bogus debt.
He said the automated system had caused a lot of “unnecessary consternation”, which he said was “something to be regretted”.
“People should not be put into the situation where unfair demands are being made of them,” he said. “Having said that, similarly as a government we do have a duty to ensure that, if people are paid too much under the welfare scheme, then that money should be repaid.”
Abetz was asked whether the social services minister, Christian Porter, and the human services minister, Alan Tudge, were out of touch for insisting there were no problems with the system.
He replied: “Ministers often rely on what the department advises them and clearly the minister has now acknowledged that things need to be changed, and that is where things need to move forward.”
The use of the automated debt recovery system has been plagued by complaints since early December. It has faced sustained criticism for wrongly targeting welfare recipients, and making it difficult for many to properly dispute supposed debts.
The system relies on an automated data-matching process comparing income reported to Centrelink with Australian Taxation Office records.
That data-matching process has been criticised for crudely comparing fortnightly reporting periods with annual income records held by the tax office, and for struggling to identify cases where the same employer has been named in two different ways.
Where the data-matching process detects a discrepancy, letters are automatically sent out demanding an explanation for the difference, which are typically up to six years old. If those letters are not received, or responded to within 21 days, the debt is issued and vulnerable Australians forced to begin repaying.
The human services minister, Alan Tudge, pledged to refine the system on Monday, mainly to ensure the initial letters are being received.
That was characterised by Labor as a backflip, after initial claims from the government that the system was working as it should. Labor’s Linda Burney continued the attack on Tudge on Tuesday, saying he had now taken longer than 21 days to respond to her formal representations to him about the system.
“The minister thinks three weeks is plenty of time for those caught in his robo-debt debacle but not for him to write a simple response, what an outrageous double standard,” Burney said.
Tudge last week told Guardian Australia the debt recovery system was largely being used to recoup overpayments made to youth allowance and Newstart recipients.
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