There are 1.34m outstanding Centrelink debts, data shows, with around 600 of these over 30 years old. Around the same time, it was also revealed that about 44,000 Australians have overpaid their Centrelink debts, some by $20,000 or more.Now, data from Services Australia shows there are 1.34m outstanding Centrelink debts, amounting to $4.93bn in debt. Approximately 645,000 have a repayment arrangement in place.‘Like battery hens’: ATO’s outsourced debt collectors face much worse conditions than those in public service, former staff sayRead moreAbout 600 of the outstanding debts are over 30 years old, with the median amount for those sitting at $5,451.49.
There are 76,800 debts between 15 and 30 years old, with a median amount of $2,197.64.The oldest outstanding debt was raised over 40 years ago and is now under a repayment arrangement, but the department would not say how much it was because of privacy. standing debts owed by former recipients who have not repaid the debt or maintained an acceptable repayment arrangement.The Australian government had agreed in principle to the Robodebt royal commission’s recommendation to reinstate the limitation of six years on debt recovery but has not said when that will be implemented or if it will apply to current debts.Christopher Rudge, a welfare expert and academic at the University of Sydney, said the debt’s “calculations cannot be trusted to be correct. For those debts already admitted to be wrong via the income apportionment resolution scheme, they are being ‘corrected’ on a likelihood test.“And for most debts under $2,000, no manual review will occur; instead, a computer program will determine whether it is ‘likely’ correct or not,” he said.“For all other remaining historical debts, many are decades old and were calculated long ago by systems incompatible with today’s auditing tools.”He said the in-principle acceptance from the government should mean any debt more than six years old should “be out of bounds” – and that the cost of trying to administer older debt could be greater than the debt itself.“In many circumstances where people have held debts for a decade or longer, it is likely that they are in financial circumstances that are prohibitive,” he said.“You could hear multiple narratives about this. One would be, well, this needs to be cracked down on harder,” Rudge said.
The applications relate to more than 201,000 debts, with $92,000 in resolution payments paid so far.Economic Justice Australia’s CEO, Kate Allingham, said up until 2017 the government had a time limit that prevented the recovery of a social security debt more than six years after a Centrelink officer knew or could reasonably have been expected to know about the circumstances that caused it.“This time limit was in place in recognition of the fact it is near impossible for someone who allegedly owes a debt to not only remember the specific circumstances they were in, but to pull together evidence from that time to defend themselves,” she said.In the 1990s, for example, payslips were in paper form.
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