The woman who was slapped with an unlawful $2,500 Centrelink debt notice by the Australian government’s automated debt system known as Robodebt has come forward with her experience.
Deanna Amato challenged the debt in court in June 2019.
It was later revealed that the debt program identified welfare recipients as having debts based on income averaging. The process was ruled unlawful.
The program, which unlawfully raised almost A$1.73 billion (US$1.18 billion) in debts against 433,000 welfare recipients, was described by Justice Brendan Murphy as a “shameful chapter” in Australia’s social security scheme.
The former Coalition government agreed to settle the case with $1.2 billion in 2020, and the program was abolished in May 2020.
At a royal commission hearing on Friday, Amato said she first discovered that she had a debt after long delays in receiving her tax return, with the entire amount then used to go towards the debt.
“It was pretty shocking and scary finding out I had a debt,” Amato told the commission.
“They had taken my whole tax return to the cent, to me that indicated that I owed more money than that, which was quite scary.”
Amato said she was worried about taking the matter to court, but after examining the documents herself, it seemed clear to her where the mistake happened.
“I just felt like I was in the right place to do it because it was just so obvious,” Amato noted.
“It was really obvious that they'd averaged out over the whole year rather than the six months I was actually only claiming Austudy.”
When the Robodebt program was first introduced in January 2017, requests for legal assistance on social security issues rose 500 percent, the commission heard.
Senior Officials Ignored Warnings
The former general manager of the Department of Human Services, Mark Withnell, said he tried to warn senior officials within Services Australia, the department employing Robodebt, that the use of averaging to calculate debt would not be supported by other agencies.Withnell said despite his warnings, the then-deputy secretary of the department, Malisa Golightly, still wanted the scheme to go continue.
“I spent some time talking with Ms Golightly to convince her that the use of income averaging would not be supported by (the Department of Social Services) and that it was probably inappropriate to continue with that,” he told the commission.
“She was very keen on the measures still proceeding.”
The former manager said he suggested alternatives to reach out to those on welfare who the department suspected of having debts to the government.
“The critical issue for me was about getting people to reconcile the information [about the debt],” Withnell said.
“That reconciliation of information would still allow us to proceed, but that using the ATO data in the way that had been suggested would not be acceptable to DSS and wasn’t an acceptable process.”
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten said on Sep. 27, 2022, the scheme was “Australia’s greatest failure of public administration in social security.”
“It was a scheme which said it was targeted for getting Centrelink cheats to pay what they owed … the truth of the matter is the scheme was unlawful,” he said.
“Once a machine … a faulty algorithm asserted a debt was owed, the onus was reversed, and the citizen had to prove why the government was wrong.
“These were David and Goliath struggles.”
