03/09/2026
Centrelink are still issuing incorrect assessments and debts. It's a system most seniors struggle with. A shout out to the whistle blowers.
A Centrelink compliance officer with more than thirty years on the job looked at the new automated debt system and saw straight away that it was raising debts against people who did not owe them.
She put it in writing. She sent it to the top of the department.
Nothing changed for years.
The officer was Colleen Taylor. She had spent 32 years at the Department of Human Services. As a compliance officer she knew, in detail, how a welfare debt was supposed to be calculated, because calculating them properly was her job.
The scheme that became known as robodebt began sending automated notices from 2016. It took a person's total income for a year from tax records and spread it evenly across 26 fortnights, then treated that flat average as what they had actually earned in each fortnight. From that assumption it generated a debt and told the person to prove it wrong.
Taylor knew why that was dangerous. Real income is lumpy. People work seasonally, pick up casual shifts, have good months and empty ones. Averaging flattens all of that and invents money that was never received in the fortnight the system claims it was. Compliance officers had always known this, which is why they did not rely on averaging alone.
In 2017 she wrote two detailed reports setting out the problem. She escalated her concerns up the chain to the department's secretary, Kathryn Campbell. She asked, on paper, whether raising debts this way was effectively Centrelink stealing from welfare recipients.
She was thanked. She was brushed aside.
Consider what she was asking a large agency to concede. That its flagship program, already live, already sending hundreds of thousands of letters, was built on a method that did not work.
The scheme was designed to bring in billions of dollars. It also quietly reversed something fundamental. Normally, if the government says you owe it money, the government has to show why. Robodebt flipped that. The computer asserted a debt, and it was left to the individual, often years after the fact, to find old payslips and bank records and prove the machine wrong. Many could not. Many did not know they were allowed to try.
The Royal Commission would later find that senior people had been warned the scheme was legally shaky and pressed on regardless.
Robodebt kept running. It ran for years. Debt collectors were sent after people. Pensioners and students and carers were told they owed thousands and given the burden of disproving it. Taylor kept turning up to work inside the department, knowing.
Eventually the courts caught up. In late 2019 the government conceded that debts raised purely on averaged income were not lawful. A class action settled in 2021 for 1.8 billion dollars in debts wiped and money repaid. The government agreed to refund or cancel around 470,000 wrongful debts.
In 2022 a Royal Commission was called. In 2023 Colleen Taylor gave evidence to it. Its final report, handed down in July 2023, called robodebt a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal. Families told the inquiry about relatives who had taken their own lives after receiving a notice. The secretary Taylor had written to was later stripped of her Order of Australia.
Taylor was one of the very few people inside the department who had said, at the time and in writing, that it was wrong.
She was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia. She has said that no honour can take away the grief the scheme caused, and that she will keep telling the story so it is not allowed to fade.
Here is where it reaches you. If you have ever received an automated debt letter from a government agency and felt the burden land on you to prove you did not owe it, robodebt is the reason that design is now treated as a scandal rather than as efficient administration.
Around 470,000 wrongful debts. One long serving officer who set the problem out in 2017, in two reports, to the most senior person she could reach.
Filed, and left there, until the damage was done.
