A former Centrelink compliance officer has said staff working on robodebt were expected to adhere to a “total obsession” with key performance indicators and effectively told to “shut up” if they tried to raise concerns.
The ex-staff member appeared before the royal commission into the illegal welfare compliance program under the pseudonym Craig Simpson on Friday.
The Brisbane-based inquiry heard Mr Simpson worked as a compliance officer at Services Australia between May 2015 and December 2015 and was involved in the rollout of the scheme that became known as robodebt.
Mr Simpson painted a distressing picture of the way welfare recipients who were found to owe a debt to Services Australia — which was then called the Department of Human Services — were treated.
He said he could count on one hand the number of cases he dealt with where there was “an indication” of dishonesty, with most people instead having accidentally failed to comply with their obligations to report their income because navigating the Centrelink system was so complex.
Mr Simpson said there was no “nuance” in the way staff were expected to deal with customers depending on whether their alleged debts had been the result of deception or, as they were in most cases, honest mistakes.
“There was no training on the psychosocial or human aspect of the (scheme),” he said.
“I found that really alarming, because the matters we were working with were extremely sensitive, and in many, many cases, (involved) a great deal of psychological distress.”
Robodebt was an automated method of calculating welfare recipients’ alleged debts by matching their reported pay with their supposed annual incomes, which were estimated by averaging data from the Australian Taxation Office.
Mr Simpson told the commission he and other staff members noticed early on there were “clear and obvious examples” where robodebt was calculating supposed incomes that were based on “invalid assumptions”.
“Management said that we were not responsible for the policy, and that it was not our role to be questioning policy. It was our role to administer and to carry out the policy,” he said.
“I think there were a number of us who identified the very real concerns with what we were doing, and we were in essence told to shut up.”
Mr Simpson said compliance officers were ranked against one another on a spreadsheet in the office that tallied the volume of calls made and number of debts raised, with “absolutely no consideration” of customer welfare.
“It was a total obsession with getting numbers. And we weren’t privy to what the KPIs were, we were just told whether we were meeting them or not.”
Mr Simpson left the workplace after just six months, saying he felt “disillusioned” and that the work was “completely incompatible with my personal values”.
Robodebt would run for another four years until it was disbanded after being found to be unlawful. By this point it had falsely accused thousands of people of owing the government money and had been linked to a number of suicides.
The program ended up costing the commonwealth nearly $1.8bn in written-off debts and compensation paid to victims who mounted a class-action lawsuit.
The royal commission is examining why the scheme was set up and how it ran until to 2019 despite its serious flaws being widely known from 2017.
Former Department of Human Services director, Tenille Collins, broke down on the stand while giving evidence to the inquiry earlier on Friday.
Ms Collins told the commission she “switched off” automatic debt raising for people who hadn’t responded to letters from Centrelink informing them they had received overpayments in December 2016.
The commission was told media pressure and Ms Collins’ own misgivings about the scheme contributed to this decision.
Under questioning from counsel assisting, Angus Scott KC, Ms Collins said she believed that “some months” later, the system reverted to averaging welfare recipients’ income for the purpose of calculating entitlements if they did not respond to attempts to contact them.
She cried as she recounted the moment her boss — then DHS secretary Malisa Golightly — found out about her decision to turn off the automated component of the scheme, claiming her boss was “furious”.
“My recollection is that for about the next hour Ms Golightly screamed at me irrationally, is the only way I could describe it,” she said.
Ms Golightly died in 2021 aged 58.
Ms Collins claimed Ms Golightly told her on numerous occasions – usually when she was trying to elevate concerns or risks – that “I was not a very good public servant and perhaps I should reassess my career choice”.
“She did threaten me numerous times with, you know, ‘You’ll be lucky if you have a job by the end of the week’,” she said.
Ms Collins also admitted during the hearing she had been concerned that the robodebt program’s development hadn’t been thought through carefully enough.
But she said she didn’t consider whether it was lawful.
“My concerns were more that this was very rushed, and we might be overlooking things that were important as opposed to being a specific concern about the legal position,” she said.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was in the top job when the controversy over robodebt blew up in 2017, is among the witnesses who have been called to appear before the royal commission next week.
The inquiry is conducting its final two weeks of public hearings before a final report is due to be handed down on June 30.
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