On Thursday, she still hadn't received a refund and was told it could be another week until she sees the money back in her account. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: "We owed $4300 on our family tax benefit debt due to underestimation of our yearly income and tried to do the right thing by paying it immediately," she told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. "We went to the myGov portal to pay it and clicked on the link that said this is the money that you owe. We put the credit card details in, pressed submit and it said the page has not been found – it didn't say it had been processed or give us a receipt number. It just looked like it hadn't worked.

"I did it again, and it was the same thing, it said 'page not found' and I thought it was an internet error and got no confirmation it had been processed. So I tried more times and my husband texted me and said 'why did you pay it three times'?" Loading She then called Centrelink who said they couldn't see her payments, telling her it can take up to two days before they show up in the system. "We went away for the weekend, it was our daughter's first birthday, and I didn't chase them until a week later when they immediately said it's a nationwide issue with IT systems with all payments that have been made," she said. "The payment portal was taking money from people, in some instances people paying multiple times, because it looked like it doesn't work the first time."

On Wednesday, 10 days after she made the payments, she received a call from a Centrelink representative who said they had refunded two extra payments but it could take up to seven days to arrive, and they still had no record of the third. "They tried to put me on a payment plan to repay it," she said. "This is incompetence ... Not good enough at all." "That's money we need, we only have one income and a family of four, we can't just have that amount in the ether missing for who knows how long. I have friends who have offered to loan us money." The woman said she made the payments on July 29. It's understood Centrelink identified and fixed the nationwide problem three days later, on August 1.

Department of Human Services general manager Hank Jongen said there were about 400 people who had made further credit card repayment attempts. By Thursday morning, about 100 people had been refunded and the department was working to process the other refunds as quickly as possible. Loading The average amount to be refunded was approximately $300, he said. "We’re deeply sorry to customers who experienced issues making payments to us last week," Mr Jongen said. "Some people didn’t get confirmation their payment to us had been successful. In some instances, they then made further payments as they thought their last attempt had been unsuccessful.

"We’re reimbursing all affected customers their repeat payments. We’ve started contacting them to let them know and provide support." "People who have incurred costs associated with this issue should contact the department to discuss reimbursement," he said. It comes several weeks after the federal government's myGov website – which provides online access to the ATO, Medicare and Centrelink – experienced outages in mid-July while people were trying to complete their tax returns. Mr Jongen said anyone who had concerns should call 1800 076 072.