Inside a Centrelink office: Chaos at branch as system flounders

LONG queues, stuck at a phone, confusion, missed payments, fury. This is what it’s like at a branch of the beleaguered welfare agency.

Long queues at a branch of Centrelink in Sydney’s inner west.

“CENTRELINK is letting me die,” reads graffiti scrawled on the wall of the disabled toilet at a branch in Sydney’s inner west.

That’s the perception of some Australians trying to negotiate a benefits system that appears seriously flawed, where letters slamming people with bogus debts of thousands of dollars were widely distributed over the Christmas period.

Long queues snake around the room, while others sit looking bored on grey seats, staring at the grey walls, yet several help desks are empty.

Alberto Bolognini, from Leichhardt, was blunt. “The system sucks,” he told news.com.au. “I pay $700 a week in taxes and when you come for help, they drive you through hell and back.”

The accusations Centrelink’s automated system is failing keep pouring in, with Aussies wrongly targeted thanks to bungled data matching with the Australian Taxation Office. The errors include claims people had two jobs because their employer has slightly different names, that they were working all year when they were unemployed for months and using old addresses for inaccurate debt notices when current ones are held by the ATO.

Those worst affected are the most vulnerable in society — pensioners, people with disabilities and those with mental health issues, some of whom have spoken of suicide after having debt collection agencies put on their case.

And the mistakes are proving hard to fix thanks to clogged phone lines, overstretched staff and difficulties in overriding the online system. That was painfully evident in the frustration expressed by the Aussies news.com.au spoke to at a packed Sydney office.

Graffiti on the inside of the door to the disabled toilets at a Sydney branch reads: ‘Centrelink is letting me die.’

‘THE SYSTEM SUCKS’

Mr Bolognini, a 53-year-old construction worker, injured the tendons in his hand three months ago and has been jobless ever since, but he’s been waiting six weeks for unemployment benefits.

“For three months I’ve been surviving on redundancy money and my tax return. Now I’m broke.

“I need money for physiotherapy, but it’s just more paperwork, meantime bills keep coming through. You’ve got to queue for two hours to see the first girl and then another two hours to see the second.”

But Annie Williams* said every business needs to adjust to new challenges and it’s the same for Centrelink, which has to deal with vast numbers of people. “There’s always long queues, I think their website is constantly needing an update, but the Centrelink staff work really hard and they’re generally nice and helpful as can be,” she told news.com.au. “They want to do the best they can for everyone. There’s hiccups but I think the system always needs to be updated, there’s new circumstances around.”

Alberto Bolognini said he’d been waiting six weeks for unemployment benefit.

‘95 PER CENT OF DEBTS ARE WRONG’

Centrelink’s problems aren’t new, with 60 per cent of calls not reaching a human in 2015-16, according to October’s Senate Estimates. Labor ministers and independent MPs have called for the system to be suspended.

Michael Bond, from Melbourne, told news.com.au the issues were also affecting Medicare repayments. Staff told him he would have to wait six months for the $500 his small family desperately needs because they were being diverted to help with the Centrelink debacle. “We’ll probably have to get a payday loan,” he said. “They’re going on holiday with their families and we can’t afford to buy food.”

An employee who works in compliance for the agency told news.com.au that “95 per cent of debts are wrong” from what he’s seen in his team. He said the Government was “cutting corners, calculating debts fast is their goal, and it’s just wrong, staff morale is so bad everywhere.”

He added: “Centrelink gets a data match from the ATO, the customer is asked to supply pay slips, if they can’t then the income is ‘annualised’ making the debt incorrect.

“Not too long ago, we conducted reviews the right way. We wrote to the employers to get a break down of the income and assessed it in the correct fortnights, but in the Government’s eyes this took too long so they adopted this dodgy incorrect system.

“In the unearned income teams, we may get a match for bank accounts, usually these reviews are for age pensioners, we are told to only address the match data and not look at other assets they may have like shares, real estate, etc, effectively only doing half the job. As you can see, the whole process is wrong.

“The Government should be held accountable.”

Frustrated Aussies visiting Centrelink say the wait can take hours.

Social Services Minister Christian Porter told news.com.au in a statement: “The online compliance system is working as intended. The data matching capability has been developed internally. The software has been used by the department to successfully carry out data matching operations for a number of years. The decision-making rules used to identify non-compliance and identify debt after explanations have been received are well established and have not been altered in the automated system and indeed are the same decision making rules that were applied by Labor when they were in government.”

He said the rate of error “in terms of finally issued debts being raised but overturned” looked set to be less than 1.6 per cent, with the Government predicting it will claw back $4 billion in overpayments.

“If there is a difference between the information reported to Centrelink and the information reported to the ATO the government owes an obligation to the Australian taxpayer to seek clarification of the difference,” Mr Porter said.

“Seeking an explanation [for this difference] is not an error on the part of Centrelink — it is Centrelink doing its job and the person fulfilling the basic responsibility of receiving welfare being that they provide information about their income when requested.

“This is critical to ensuring the integrity of the welfare system — if someone receives benefits to which they are not entitled, the Government is required by law to recover the money.”

The Commonwealth Ombudsman is now investigating the complaints and Shadow Minister for Human Services Linda Burney has written to the Australian National Audit Office requesting an inquiry into the debacle.

The CPSU (Community and Public Sector Union) says service standards have already dropped to unacceptable levels following thousands of job cuts in the Department of Human Services, with the latest scandal piling on more pressure.

“There’s a perfect storm of work coming, with this debt recovery scheme likely to be just part of the problem,” assistant national secretary Michael Tull said on Tuesday.

Alana Wesley, from Petersham, said the system got her university wrong and her youth allowance was cut off, but she believes the service at Centrelink is slowly improving.

‘WE’VE BEEN BLED DRY’

Alana Wesley, a 25-year-old fine arts graduate from Petersham, said Centrelink appeared to have worked on their service in the wake of the news of the inaccurate debt letters.

“I’ve also noticed staff cuts but strangely, I don’t know if it’s connected [to the complaints], for the past two weeks there’s been better service,” she said. “It’s improved.

“I’ve been trying to get my youth allowance payment but they put down the wrong university, despite the fact I had put in the documents. Six months ago my payments got cut off so I’m still trying to get back pay for the course I finished in November. It’s been very delayed.

“I know a lot of people in the same boat.”

Jeff and Lisa Thomas*, a couple in their sixties who spoke to news.com.au at the Sydney Centrelink office, said they had been battling the system all year. “We didn’t get any money for three months,” said Jeff, 60, who was made redundant from his job in property in February and hasn’t been able to find another job since. “There’s not enough staff. They should have twice as many people. “People are passing work on to others. They put me on the phone to someone in Canberra, I was on the phone for an hour and they said, it’s [the branch] that has to deal with that. I looked around and security said, you can’t do that. Eventually someone helped.”

The couple decided to sell their house and downsize, and began receiving rent allowance of $123 a fortnight to help fund their $600-a-week apartment while they looked for somewhere to buy.

Then one member of staff told them shouldn’t be receiving the allowance and would have to pay it back. “We’re not sure that’s right, because two other members of staff said we were,” said Jeff. “The staff don’t know the policy. We’ve been bled dry, they should be encouraging people to downsize.”

Jeff also receives $28 a week from Newstart if he applies for 10 jobs — most of which he says he hasn’t a hope of getting — but recently discovered he only needed to apply for five.

Lisa, 67, said staff had gradually been replaced by “friendly, efficient, helpful self-service — in other words, nothing.”

She believes the office needs dozens more people, and advises others to ask for copies of anything they sign at Centrelink and keep their own file. Hers is 120 pages long. “Practices are sloppy, they’re stressed and understaffed,” she said. “I don’t think they’re properly trained.

“I feel sorry for the people who work there. They are stressed. The Government is trying to screw money out of the poorest of the poor.

“Now all they do is accuse people of bludging, not wanting jobs.”

* Names changed to protect identities

If you or someone you know needs help, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.