The social services minister, Christian Porter, has refused to apologise for Centrelink’s automated debt recovery system, after a Senate inquiry found it had caused trauma, stress and shame to Australia’s most vulnerable.

The Senate inquiry into the robo debt system released its final report on Wednesday night, recommending the system be suspended until its flaws are resolved.



The report described the debt recovery system as “so flawed that it was set up to fail” and said it had “a fundamental lack of procedural fairness” at every stage.



“This lack of procedural fairness disempowered people, causing emotional trauma, stress and shame,” the report found.



But Porter said on Thursday the system was “not a matter for apology”.



He described the inquiry’s report as “political” and noted there was a strong minority dissenting view in the report.

“This is not a matter for apology,” Porter told the ABC. “What we have is a responsibility to the taxpayer to make sure that we are paying people exactly what it is that they dutifully required to receive and no more and no less.

“There are a massive amount of overpayments that occur in the system, now we are actually tackling that problem. That’s not a matter that we would apologise for, there have been a whole range of refinements to the debt recovery system.”

Victorian Legal Aid has been helping people hit by the debt recovery system since last year. It has dealt with twice as many Centrelink matters in the first five months of this year than the same time last year.

The organisation’s civil justice director, Dan Nicholson, said Porter’s comments show the government was continuing to ignore clear evidence of flaws with the system.

“It’s been clear from the very start that there’s a disconnect between government claims of a system working well and the real experience of people dealing with Centrelink,” Nicholson told Guardian Australia. “It’s a shame the government continues to have a tin ear.”

The system has been plagued by criticism since it was launched in earnest in September.

Critics say the increased automation of the debt recovery system has caused the issuing of false debts and shifted the onus onto vulnerable Australians to prove they don’t owe the government money.

The inquiry made 21 recommendations, including that all debts calculated using the often-inaccurate “income averaging” method be reassessed by humans.

That method divides a person’s annual income crudely by 26 fortnights to assume they have been working all year, and were therefore ineligible for welfare payments.

The inquiry also called for the government to review all cases in which a 10% debt recovery fee was automatically imposed. Welfare rights groups have previously warned that automatically slugging individuals with a 10% recovery fee may be unlawful.



It recommended that voluntary data-matching guidelines be adhered to, barriers to communication with vulnerable groups be resolved and the new online portal for debt matters be redesigned.

More information should be provided to debtors on their rights and options, and funding for community legal centres should be reviewed to ensure they were able to assist affected individuals.

The inquiry also called for the Department of Human Services to be adequately resourced to implement the recommendations.

The lack of resourcing for the department has been a key concern of the Community and Public Sector Union.

The union has warned Centrelink is an agency in crisis, due to thousands of job cuts, and said staff were dismayed at the impact of the debt recovery system.

The CPSU on Thursday urged the government to implement all the recommendations of the inquiry.

“This senate inquiry has confirmed what our hardworking members in Centrelink already knew all too well,” the CPSU’s national secretary, Nadine Flood said. “Robo debt is a shameful shambles that’s caused unreasonable suffering to hundreds of thousands of Australians who’ve received debt letters and the staff who’ve tried to pick up the pieces.”

The human services minister, Alan Tudge, attacked the accuracy of the inquiry report on Wednesday.



“This is a politically motivated and factually inaccurate report, reflecting the fact that Labor and the Greens don’t support auditing of the welfare system,” he said.



He pointed to an earlier report by the commonwealth ombudsman, which said the system was capable of calculating debts fairly if it was provided with the right information.

The ombudsman’s report also found it was placing unreasonable and unfair demands on individuals, and had numerous deficiencies that could have been resolved by better project management.

Nicholson said it was wrong to frame the ombudsman’s report as an endorsement of the system.

“I think the government is placing heavy reliance on the ombudsman’s report, as if that somehow gave the initiative a good bill of health,” he said. “On balance, you would have to say that the report is highly critical.”