One couple who aren’t surprised by the recent controversies related to Centrelink are east Queanbeyan’s Judith and Trevor Taylor.
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Last August Mrs Taylor had her pension cut off when the department mistook her for another person.
She had her payments withheld for three months while she spent countless hours both on the phone and waiting in line at the Queanbeyan Centrelink office trying to fix their mistake.
"It (the letter) said I had an income stream from the Australian Postal superannuation, who I have never worked for so I knew they got it wrong,” Mrs Taylor said.
The mishap was also a privacy blunder, revealing someone else’s finances, their employment history, superannuation, ABN, and later personal address.
And to make matters worse, Mrs Taylor was facing being fined for taking too long to return documents to fix a mistake she didn’t make.
Once she did get to speak with a customer service person at her local Centrelink and explain the error she said she was treated rudely and the mishap still wasn’t corrected.
The mistake was not completely resolved until the middle of November, with the Taylors having to rely on Trevor’s pension just to get by.
Mr Taylor said the stressful period wore out his wife and he is not surprised by the uproar related to Centrelink’s controversial robo-debt policy.
It was revealed this week the Coalition government would be targeting families, pensioners and disabled Australians with the debt collecting process.
The mid-year economic forecast tables published last week show the government has booked savings of $1.1 billion clawing back over payments of the aged pension.
Centrelink is retrieving these funds through a data-matching program, which uses an automated system to match information held by Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office and calculate over payments.
But the policy has been beset by errors and has been hugely controversial with many of those targeted for debt recovery saying they are being hounded by debt collectors, or threatened with jail, for money that they do not owe.
Department of Human Services General Manager Hank Jongen said the agency is committed to the privacy of their customers and takes issues of this nature very seriously.
“The department deals with around 99 percent of the Australian population,” Mr Jongen said. “While we endeavour to avoid privacy incidents, these do occur in a small number of cases.”
He said many of these incidents are identified and resolved internally before it impacts their customers.
“When a situation like this occurs, we conduct a thorough review to determine the underlying causes and what corrective action needs to be taken,” Mr Jongen said.
“We also review our standard practices to see if changes need to be made, or further staff training provided.”
With Noel Towell.
