THE Centrelink debacle that’s slugged Aussies with thousands of dollars of unfair debt is the latest in a string of disasters in which technology has let us down — with devastating consequences.

We have become a nation where screw-ups are the new normal.

Almost exactly a year ago, Centrelink was in the middle of another storm, when it was forced to apologise for a New Year’s computer glitch that incorrectly told 73,000 families they were in debt.

When Family Tax Benefits claimants checked their accounts online, they were wrongly shown to owe money, with one mother mistakenly charged more than $700.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics then paid IBM $9.6 million to run the bungled 2016 Census because its own systems were antiquated and unreliable. The national survey was a massive failure, with the website going down for 40 hours and a Senate Committee inquiry finding “significant and obvious oversights” in its delivery.

And in early December, around the time Centrelink ramped up distribution of bogus debt letters to Aussies looking forward to the festive season, the ATO’s online system crashed after a failure in a hardware storage solution provided by Hewlett Packard.

FEARS OF SUICIDE

We live in a world where the support networks we rely on are increasingly automated, so when they go wrong, the danger is palpable.

If our systems fail, vulnerable people can be cut off from vital resources, personal information leaked to thieves and innocent citizens accused of crimes they never committed. At worst, these screw-ups can leave disabled, elderly and mentally-ill people trapped in a nightmare with no escape, as we have seen with the Centrelink crisis — which has seen some talk of suicide and the agency repeatedly tweet the Lifeline number.

But despite hundreds of complaints about the inaccurate debt letters generated because of computer glitches, the Government has insisted the system is working.

After it announced it would claw back $400 million in unemployment benefit overpayments, Social Services Minister Christian Porter said this week that 20 per cent of review letters were sent to people who did not owe anything. But he said the letters were not debt letters and only asked for more information to explain a discrepancy between employment data held by Centrelink and the ATO.

“The rate of error is measured in terms of finally issued debts being raised but overturned and present indications are that this will be less than 1.6 per cent,” he told news.com.au in a statement.

“If there is a difference between the information reported to Centrelink and the information reported to the ATO the government owes an obligation to the Australian taxpayer to seek clarification.

“This is critical to ensuring the integrity of the welfare system.

“The online compliance system is working as intended. The data matching capability has been developed internally. The software has been used by the department to successfully carry out data matching operations for a number of years. The decision-making rules used to identify non-compliance and identify debt after explanations have been received are well established and have not been altered in the automated system.”

Other claims are being revised down as people submit missing information: so will the exercise be worth the money in time, resources and emotional distress?

‘BROKEN FROM THE START’

The problems for Centrelink go a long way back, with 60 per cent of calls not reaching a human in 2015-16, according to October’s Senate Estimates.

The IT glitches should have emerged when automation was introduced in July, but the agency pushed ahead with sending out its inaccurate December letters.

“This looks like it was broken from the start,” IT expert Justin Warren told news.com.au. “It looks the system was developed in-house, and it’s gone into a more automated mode where human oversight is removed. The burden of fixing that is now on people receiving notices. That’s weird.”

Mr Warren, who has worked for Telstra, Australia Post, IBM and ANZ, said that if any other company was made aware of a 20 per cent error rate, a program would be delayed. He points to basic errors — dates not lining up, salaries spread over a year despite months of unemployment, incorrect addresses in the system and the computer thinking one employer with varying names was two. Yet that data is available: up-to-date addresses and unvarying employer ABNs are held by the ATO.

“I don’t know how it made it out of testing,” he said. “If there were this many problems with it, you’d pull the plug. There’s no crisis management going on.”

THE PROBLEM WITH BIG DATA

Over the past few days, senior ministers, lawyers, political parties and human rights organisations have spoken out about the Centrelink crisis and demanded the system be suspended. But how did it get to this point?

“There’s this gung-ho attitude about the benefits and opportunities in adopting big data tools wholesale,” Australian Privacy Foundation vice-chair David Vaile told news.com.au.

Big data is designed to work with incomplete information, he said, which works just fine for the advertising industry, for example, where a slight inaccuracy is not life and death.

“The marketing and overhyping of big data as the answer to everything hasn’t taken into account that for other decisions it’s fatally flawed,” he said. “It needs sophistication at a policy level and IT implementation level to work out which areas it’s not suitable for.”

More data is not necessarily better if the analysis isn’t there, he added. “It’s unreliable, it needs a lot of human checking,” he said. “You need to assume it’s wrong. Have they charged in without the IT skills and sceptical development?

“Maybe 90 per cent are OK. That means, however, if you’ve got a million people, with 100,000 people you’re making errors and unfounded decisions and putting them needlessly into distress.”

‘DIRTY, DODGY, MISLEADING’

Things go wrong with any large system involving humans, says Mr Warren. But the Government needs to prepare for problems and acknowledge mistakes.

“There’s a lack of willingness to take responsibility, even a denial there’s a problem at all.

“It doesn’t sound like an efficient use of resources, staff time answering phones over $50. Why not do more about large-scale fraud instead of harassing grandma just before Christmas. And these are taxpaying citizens, they’re cross-matching data with the ATO.

“They’re calling back money, but why is it being overspent in the first place? It’s daft and ineffective. There’s so much about this that makes no sense.”

While blame was heaped on IBM for the census fail, outsourcing is not always a bad thing, according to Mr Warren.

“If something’s not strategic to your business, like cleaning or plumbing, outsource it. If something is desperately important to your business it’s better to do it in-house or at least have some oversight. With the ABS, that oversight wasn’t there.

“With Centrelink, have they outsourced and how much is in-house? If it’s in-house, clearly there’s a lack of capability.”

Mr Vaile says it’s simply a question of being transparent, so the system can easily be checked and corrected. “If it’s dirty, dodgy, misleading information that works for other purposes, are they prepared to provide maximum transparency so we can check the quality and accuracy of the data. They’ve got the tools in place.

“Accuracy, completeness and up-to-dateness of information — that’s a right.”

‘LAST BASTION OF THE 90S’

The Government’s chief former digital officer Paul Shetler, who resigned in November after being hired to transform its approach to technology, told news.com.au the public service needs to be “radically re-skilled” with people who are trained in design, product, delivery, leadership and data.

“The root cause of these failures is a deskilled public service that doesn’t understand — and sometimes fears — 21st Century technology,” he said. “The Government has no co-ordinated approach to technology yet.

“Our government looks like it is the last bastion of the 90s outsourced model. We need to fix the basics first, before we do the fancy dancing holograms.

“We need less reliance on vested interests. Government needs to own its own strategy like every other 21st Century company does.

“We need the APS (Australian Public Service) to go back to providing frank and fearless advice to ministers — and their ministerial advisers — and much less butt-covering to avoid blame.”

He said if we continue down our current path, the country will have a government that offers inferior services and increasingly fails, while spending $16 billion and counting on these services.

“The public will lose faith in its politicians and its government’s ability to deliver service, with the crisis of confidence that follows that.

“The public needs to understand what’s at stake. It will only get better if the people demand it.”