Centrelink: Almost quarter of calls to agency went unanswered, National Audit report finds

Updated

Almost a quarter of all calls made to Centrelink last year went unanswered, a new report by the National Audit Office has revealed.

The report estimated that of the 43 million calls in 2013-14 that were able to enter the network, about 13 million were simply abandoned.

It also found the average wait time for people waiting to speak to Centrelink increased to 17 minutes.

Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) national secretary Nadine Flood said she was most concerned for welfare-dependent Australians and those who were highly dependent on the service.

"One of our members who doesn't work for Centrelink sent me a screen shot of their phone showing that they'd waited over 90 minutes on the families line," she said.

"This is tough for people in the community who rely on Centrelink, and what that means is that people with disabilities are now waiting more than half an hour to get their calls answered.

"The message is simple: you've got to fund this service properly and put permanent jobs back into Centrelink so that people can actually get the service from government they need."

The Minister for Human Services, Senator Marise Payne, said that for more complex cases the time taken to deal with customers would be longer than average.

Centrelink, Medicare and child support benefits are complex interrelated payments and people actually need to talk to a real person. CPSU national secretary Nadine Flood

"Ideally we have a KPI [key performance indicator] at the moment of 16 minutes in which we'd like to be able to manage a call and deal with it, and we met that KPI last year," she said.

But she said Centrelink was working on a new program, called the Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation Process, to get more members faster.

"Over an extended period of time we've been making significant changes to our system," Senator Payne said.

And she said Centrelink's online services were a more efficient way of dealing with the organisation.

"If they need to check the progress of a payment, for example, they'll be able to do that much more easily [online]," she said.

More than 36 million Centrelink transactions were completed using mobile apps, she added.

But Ms Flood said going online was not always a good option.

"Centrelink, Medicare and child support benefits are complex interrelated payments, and people actually need to talk to a real person," she said.

Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, community-and-society, australia

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