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The Morrison government is ramping up its robo-debt operations despite problems with incorrect debt notices, launching a new data-matching initiative using Medicare data to look for "discrepancies" between people's Centrelink claims and medical records. A gazette notice quietly released by the Department of Human Services last week outlined the new data-matching program, which aimed to identify social security fraud by matching "identities and details held in Centrelink records with those held in Medicare records". Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert confirmed on Tuesday that as many as one in five debt recovery notices issued by his department may be incorrect, and apologised to a woman who had received a debt notice for her dead son. "Because of the size of the debt being uneconomical to recover and the length of time, the department should have simply waived the debt," he said during Question Time. "They didn't, my department was wrong, I apologise for it." Federal Labor seized on the case to attack the government over robo-debt, with former opposition leader Bill Shorten calling for the system to be scrapped after revelations that Centrelink employees worked to enforcement targets. Mr Shorten, who is Labor spokesman for government services, said the robo-debt program was "seriously malfunctioning" with more than 100,000 Australians having received "incorrect demands to pay debts to the government that they didn't owe". "It is being enforced in a harsh and cruel way and we now know it is being driven from above," he said. The department, which already uses a computer program to check Centrelink records against Australian Taxation Office records, has brought Medicare into the program because "data-matching multiple records is more likely to identify ... premeditated fraudulent activities," the notice said. Medicare data will be used to check usage of the health system by Centrelink customers over the past five years. Australian Privacy Foundation health committee chair Bernard Robertson-Dunn said he was concerned about the robo-debt expansion, saying it risked unfairly targeting vulnerable Australians. "The people who are the least likely to defend themselves are the most likely to be on welfare or using Medicare," Dr Robertson-Dunn said. In 2016, the department admitted to uploading sensitive Medicare claims records to the wrong recipient's electronic health records 86 times in 12 months, after the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner was notified of the breaches. It was revealed on Monday that DHS had mailed letters to almost 50,000 patients prescribed lithium inviting them to take part in a bipolar study, raising questions about how Medicare stores and uses private healthcare information. The APF opposes the automated use of data to pursue Centrelink debts without human verification. Liberal MP Tim Wilson said the idea of "a human pair of eyes" to "go through every single debt collection notice" and check against individual tax returns was "verging on impossible" due to the scale of the robo-debt program. Mr Robert said his department had recovered $1.9 billion worth of Centrelink debts since July 1, 2015 through its income compliance checking processes and that 80 per cent of robo-debt notices had "resulted in a debt being collected". He defended the program, saying the government had "a lawful responsibility" to recoup social security benefits that had been wrongly paid. "Governments of all persuasions over the last 20-plus years have sought to recover debts that have arisen because citizens have put forward an assessment of their income and when their tax return came through, that was different," he said. "So can I say, to all citizens who are receiving income support, or indeed, family assistance payments, regularly update through either the myGov application, through a telephone service, or through a service centre, update the assessment of your income.

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