The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) illegally cancelled the benefits of 1,009 Jobseeker recipients after failing to update a core ICT system to reflect changed laws, the Commonwealth Ombudsman has found in a scathing automated payments review.
Cancellation of the benefits occurred after 964 income support payment recipients were flagged as having failed to meet mandatory mutual obligation requirements – including attending appointments and job interviews, following up on job referrals, and accepting suitable job offers.
Compliance with those obligations is mandatory under the Targeted Compliance Framework (TCF), a range of policies that govern the administration of benefits under Workforce Australia Online, Workforce Australia Services, ParentsNext and Disability Employment Services programs.
In April 2022, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Streamlined Participation Requirements and other Measures) Act 2022 (SPROM Act) introduced a requirement for DEWR officers to exercise discretion to reduce or cancel income support based on individual circumstances.
Despite this policy change, however, the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s newly published audit of the situation, called Automation in the Targeted Compliance Framework, found benefits were still cancelled immediately once officers recorded a compliance failure in DEWR’s automated systems.
“Not only did the system cancel the payment without reflecting the need for a discretionary decision as to whether cancellation should occur,” it found, “the decision-makers themselves did not embark upon that discretionary consideration.”
The error was discovered last July, at which point it had been occurring for two years – yet even after the DEWR secretary paused cancellation of income support to investigate, the benefits of a further 45 job seekers were automatically and illegally cancelled by the TCF system.
Process failures compounded technical oversight
“Insufficient consultation processes” among the law’s authors, DEWR and Services Australia meant the agencies “did not ensure their respective processes and computer systems were complying with the amended legislation,” the Ombudsman found in branding the cancellations “not lawful”.
It offered seven recommendations – including a moratorium on cancellations until the problems with the TCF system are fixed, clarification of roles during legislation development, annual training on decision-making, regular internal audits of legal compliance, and other steps.
The Ombudsman also excoriated DEWR for failing to follow a SPROM Act order to implement a Digital Protections Framework (DPF) that the Parliamentary Inquiry into Workforce Australia Employment Services previously called “critical… to protect the rights of often vulnerable people.”
A “robust” DPF, the committee held, would include measures “related to the use of personal information and data within the employment services IT system” – yet despite DEWR drafting a DPF three years ago, the Ombudsman found the instrument still has not been finalised.
“Despite their awareness of the risks in automating income support decision-making, and the serious impacts these decisions can have on the most vulnerable job seekers,” it said, “agencies failed to adequately… consult on the impact of the amendments and implement safeguards.”
“DEWR also took too long to act once they identified potential unlawful cancellation decisions.”
Social support agencies aren’t the only ones ignoring the impact of their decisions, with a new Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) report calling out “poor or inflexible responses by telcos to requests for payment assistance” from customers dealing with hardship.
The report, which gauged compliance with new financial hardship rules, delved into over 900 complaints and found telcos “exacerbating financial hardship” with direct debit errors and high bill charges – with some consumers even foregoing food and rent so they could pay those bills.
Echoes of a painful past
For all the benefits that process automation provides government agencies managing income support programs at scale – TCF administers JobSeeker payments for around 740,000 Australians – the failure to update automated decision-making has opened old wounds.
The “crude and cruel” ‘Robodebt’ system was enabled by similar oversights at the highest levels, the Australian Public Service Commission found last year in concluding that executives should have considered whether the system – which wrongly vilified 526,000 people – was “ethically sound”.
Similar concerns tainted the UK Post Office’s “disastrous” Horizon system, with some $3.7 billion (£1.8 billion) in compensation mooted after hundreds of subpostmasters were prosecuted over errors in a system that Fujitsu and ignorant government executives insisted was error-free.
