Christian Porter flags broader debt recovery effort

The Australian 12:00AM January 4, 2017

David Crowe

The federal government has vowed to extend its program to recover $4 billion in welfare debts from almost two million Australians despite admitting to “small instances” where people are being asked to refund money they do not owe.

Social Services Minister Christian Porter declared the program to be working so well it would be ramped up over the next four years, as he ridiculed Labor demands to suspend it in order to stop the false claims for refunds.

The minister acknowledged the Centrelink data matching program was making some mistakes and urged those getting letters from the agency to “go online and explain” the discrepancies to avoid incurring a debt.

Some of the 169,000 people sent letters have taken to social media to warn of false claims when Centrelink incorrectly calculated their annual income or assumed they had two jobs when their employer’s name was recorded slightly differently in the Centrelink and Australian Taxation Office computer systems.

“If the issue is around the fact that there’s been an annualisation of money that was earned in a short period of time, you go online and you explain that,” Mr Porter said yesterday.

“I’m sure that in a number of small instances that’s happening, so you go online and you respond by noting that that was the issue that’s arisen and that is the end of the matter.”

“What this system is doing is actually raising real debts around real overpayments based on real cross-referencing of evidence.”

Mr Porter said the letters issued since July had already raised $300 million and showed the government was right to assume it could recover $4bn over four years by widening the checks to 1.7 million welfare recipients.

A key complaint yesterday was that Centrelink was mistakenly “averaging” a welfare recipient’s annual income over 26 fortnights to conclude that benefits paid during part of the year should be repaid.

The government argues that Centrelink is calculating the annual income against the recipient’s statements to the agency, then checking this against ATO records and asking for a repayment if there is any discrepancy.

Legal aid agencies are advising people to challenge the letters given official figures from Centrelink last year showing that 37.5 per cent of its decisions were revised after internal reviews.

Victoria Legal Aid executive director for civil justice Dan Nicholson said his group was ­advising people to challenge the notices. “If you feel like Centrelink’s made the wrong decision, quite often it turns out they have,” he said. “This data matching system is unfairly putting the onus on people to correct mistakes that are being made by Centrelink.”

Mr Porter said only 0.16 per cent of those letters resulted in complaints to Centrelink — or 276 complaints out of 169,000 letters over the past six months — and showed that only a “tiny minority” were having problems.

Labor human services spokeswoman Linda Burney said the ministers’s figures did not reflect the actual amount of errors in the system.

“That is probably because when you’ve been wrongly accused of fraud and asked to pay back thousands of dollars, the last thing you want to do is wait on hold to Centrelink for hours to make a complaint that goes nowhere,” Ms Burney said.