What do you do if you receive a letter from Centrelink claiming that you owe them money - and demanding that you pay it back or face recovery by a debt collector ? A lot depends on the sort of person you are and the sort of records you are in the habit of keeping.
Last year Centrelink issued 65,000 such demands in November 2016 claiming that Family Tax Benefits had been overpaid. About 21,400 families were able to prove that this Centrelink claim was false - and that they owed - nothing !
Centrelink turns away criticism of its methods with the claim that these errors are the fault of it's clients because they failed to " engage " by meticulously informing the welfare agency of all and every change of circumstance that occurred. It didn't seem to register with them that being badly wrong in one third of their demands for repayment was an unacceptable rate of error.
It also raises another worrying possibility. How many of those served with a recovery notice simply rolled over and paid the money because they are lousy record keepers and they had no way of proving Centrelink wrong ? In the eyes of the Centrelink " customer ", they are dealing with a monolith that has all the power. Many families lack the educational ability to take on the highly trained Centrelink professionals they will face across a desk if they lodge an objection. They need an accountant or a lawyer, and that brings the prospect of immense bills way beyond their ability to pay.
Few disagree with the notion that welfare fraud is a blight on the treasury but the methods now being employed to cross check with the taxation office are fraught with danger. They are two totally different regimes with vast anomalies that are bound to produce incompatibilities. When the computer records of each are subjected to a cross match - as happened with this Centrelink fiasco - a disaster for welfare recipients was inevitable.
The Mandarins that run government departments can see that this age of the computer has the ability to clean up the mass of records that are kept by a vast assortment of government agencies. When the computer displaced card systems and book keeping ledgers each little entity created its own computer records in isolation. We now have literally hundreds on separate government departments with individually crafted computer systems keeping the records of whatever line of business they are responsible for. It is the ambition of many government planning bodies to see them all integrated into a common functionality so that tapping in an individuals code will bring the entire access of that persons data for viewing.
Such a utopian dream has obvious advantages, but there are also dangers. Nobody can seriously claim that computers are secure from penetration by hackers. It is evident that should this world return to war the communication age will be an early battlefield. Even in times of peace, many would question the wisdom of allowing any form of national government to have ultimate control of the citizenry by allowing their existence to disappear - at the click of a mouse.
Perhaps this Centrelink fiasco is an opportunity to think long and hard about just what sort of society we will allow to develop into the future !
No comments:
Post a Comment