This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Centrelink’s error-prone debt recovery system has been slammed for placing blind faith in big data and prioritising “efficiency over human welfare”, as lawyers, privacy advocates and data experts join calls for it to be suspended.

Labor has continued to press the Coalition to stop Centrelink’s automated debt recovery system, which senator Doug Cameron described as a deliberate targeting of the poor and vulnerable.

The government’s automated compliance system, which began in July, has been the subject of repeated complaints, which stem from its comparison of income reported to Centrelink and information held by the Australian Taxation Office.

It has been accompanied by threats of jail for those who do not pay, a joint police-Centrelink campaign targeting geographic areas, the imposition of a 10% debt recovery fee and plans to charge interest on welfare debts and remove the six-year statutory limit on retrieving overpayments.

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Legal Aid Victoria, the Australian privacy foundation, the Australian council for social service, and independent Andrew Wilkie have all raised serious concerns, urging the human services minister, Alan Tudge, to intervene.



IT and data expert Justin Warren – who has worked for IBM, ANZ, Australia Post and Telstra, among others – said Centrelink’s system appeared to rest on the “idiotic” assumption that “big data was magic”.



“It’s not. It’s a messy, complex, statistical system that is wrong a lot,” Warren said. “All models are wrong, but some are useful. It’s the choice of how you deal with when the system is wrong that reveals how you view the world.”

Once a discrepancy is detected by the automated data-matching process – currently occurring at a rate of 20,000 a week – the onus then falls on welfare recipients to prove they were entitled to claim benefits, often forcing them to find payslips and employment information from up to six years ago.

“What the department has done, however, is placed all the work of proving an error exists on the humans they are supposed to serve (the clue is in the name),” Warren said. “The humans have to do a bunch of paperwork to prove the machine is wrong.

“Prioritising efficiency over human welfare is just one choice among many. I don’t think it’s the ethical choice.”



The Australian Privacy Foundation described the system as a “clusterfuck”, that wrongly assumed the initial data matching was accurate and then abandoned procedural fairness.



“There’s so much that can go wrong here that it’s astounding,” the foundation’s chair, Kat Lane, said. “And falsely accusing people of things, and sending them letters, and particularly some of our most disadvantaged people … you’d want to make sure you got it absolutely right before doing that.”

Lane said the sharing of data en masse should also cause significant privacy concerns for Australians.

“This is just the thin edge of the wedge, there is a clear plan to do comprehensive data matching of every silo of government,” Lane said. “It’s tracking, you’re tracking your citizens. You can’t live under a rock, we’ve all got bank accounts, we’ve all got tax returns, we’ve got people on Centrelink … you touch the government all the time.

“But what they want to do is track you, they want to gain efficiencies by tracking you.”



The government has continued to express its confidence in the compliance system, saying customers are given the opportunity to dispute discrepancies they believe to be incorrect.

The vast majority of disputes, they say, are resolved without the need for individuals to obtain payslips or letters from their old employers.

But Guardian Australia last week spoke with a Centrelink whistleblower, who works in the compliance area. The source said only about 20 of the hundreds of cases they had reviewed turned out to be legitimate debts

Victoria Legal Aid said there were real problems with using such an imprecise method of comparison.

The organisation’s civil justice, access, and equity executive director, Dan Nicholson, said it was inconceivable that such a flawed approach would ever be used to levy tax debts to corporations.



“So it’s hard to understand why it’s acceptable for Centrelink to do so,” he said.

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“I agree with Acoss that the system should be suspended until concerns are addressed.”

Nicholson called on those who felt they had been wrongly billed to consider challenging the decision.

He said most people who did so had a good chance of winning, but warned that many would simply pay without bothering to check if the debt was justified.

The opposition renewed calls on Thursday for the system to be suspended.

Cameron said the system should not be relying on a “robot” to deliberately target the poor.

“It’s deliberate, the cross-matching is a deliberate decision by the government to target welfare recipients. A deliberate targeting of some of the most vulnerable people in the community with a crude, inaccurate system,” Cameron said.

“We say suspend the system, do the analysis, do a proper check on what is being asked of individuals.”