Submitted 6 months ago by LineNoise@kbin.social to australia@aussie.zone
Watchdog says Services Australia and the Department of Social Services ‘did not act promptly’ to address the issue and calls on agencies to apologise
I feel disgusted by the whole robodebt thing, and I can’t even imagine how people were devestated by this.
But I swear, if it was me, I’d be looking at suing the shit out of them. Surely there would be lawyers that would take this on for a percentage of the winnings?
It’s all happening over again. Check “robotax”.
What do you mean “should consider”??? They’re unlawful, strike them down…
The problem is they don’t know which ones are unlawful.
Just assume they all are - I’d be willing to bet it would be the cheaper option than paying staff to sift through the reports then refunding the legit ones.
Burn it all down and start fresh.
Ah. Okay… Gotcha
More than that, press criminal charges since they’re unlawful.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In its second report, titled Accountability in Action, the ombudsman called on the agencies to apologise for “decision delays, and for historic unlawful calculations”.
The ombudsman said Services Australia and DSS “have a responsibility to identify and assess, in a timely way, the impact historic unlawful calculations had on customers, and develop a fair and reasonable remediation strategy that considers all possible options”.
In some cases the payslips relied on by Services Australia to calculate welfare debts don’t align with the fortnightly income reporting periods.
The ombudsman found that under the process of “apportionment”, welfare recipients’ employment income was spread across two or more fortnightly periods, which are used to calculate entitlement to Centrelink payments such as jobseeker.
The ombudsman’s report reveals the reason behind delayed redress is that the agencies are still “settling a final legal position about how to lawfully calculate employment income before they recommence assessing cases”.
The ombudsman said the agencies had “not taken appropriate steps” to assess the impact, develop a remediation strategy, pause debts, and explain the issue to welfare recipients.
The original article contains 627 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Nonameuser678@aussie.zone 6 months ago
This whole agency and department needs to be completely overhauled. I’m fairly certain services australia are still breaking many laws in their day to day operations.They need to be put into crisis mode, have business as usual mode suspended, auto-approve payments, hire a fucktone more staff (permanently) and fix shit. I would have thought Shorten would have the political will to do something about this but he’s been so disappointing.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m not sure if anything needs to be “fixed”. They just need more staff. They’ve laid off tens of thousands of staff over the last decade and as far as I know it hasn’t even been a cost cutting measure.
The department has spent a fortune paying the remaining staff penalty/overtime rates to fill in staff shortage gaps and a lack of staff has massively increased the workload of the staff because problems are easier to avoid that fix after the fact.
For example when my kid was born, someone in the office stuffed up his registration. It took over a year to fix that simple mistake and created a huge amount of work for the department. In the old days, when the department had enough staff, they would’ve fixed it in five minutes.
DolphinLundgrin@aussie.zone 6 months ago
Why even bother fixing it. Shut it down, move to UBI, plus a new - less cunty - outfit for disability payments etc.