Australia’s national corruption watchdog will investigate six individuals for their involvement in the ‘Robodebt’ scandal after its initial decision not to do so was reversed by an independent expert.
In a statement on Tuesday, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) said that it would investigate the six referrals it received from the Royal Commission into the Robodebt automated debt recovery scheme following a decision made by independent delegate Geoffrey Nettle.
The NACC will now launch an investigation to determine “whether or not any of these six people engaged in corrupt conduct”.
Midway through last year, the NACC announced that it would not be investigating these six public servants, a decision that was heavily criticised and led to the commission receiving 1,200 complaints broadly expressing “profound disappointment”.
It was revealed at the time that NACC Commissioner Paul Brereton had declared a “close association” with one of the individuals referred by the Royal Commission and had delegated ultimate decision-making power to a Deputy Commissioner.
But a subsequent inquiry by the Inspector of the NACC Gail Furness found that Brereton still had “comprehensive” involvement in the decision-making process “before, during and after” a meeting where it was decided that the referrals would not be investigated.
Furness found that the Commissioner was “affected by apprehended bias” and should have “removed himself from related decision-making processes and limited his exposure to the relevant factual information”.
She found that he had engaged in “officer misconduct” due to an error of judgement, but that there was “no intentional wrongdoing”.
Decision overturned
In response to these findings, the NACC appointed Nettle as an independent delegate to reconsider whether the six Robodebt referrals should be investigated.
He returned his findings to the NACC last week, deciding that the NACC should in fact launch an investigation into the six Robodebt referrals, although the reasoning for this will not be made public.
“Consistent with its usual practice, the Commission does not publish reasons for commencing an investigation, as doing so many prejudice the investigations, disclose information which the Commission is required by law to keep confidential, compromise investigative pathways and / or unfairly impact reputations and rights of individuals to impartial adjudication,” the NACC statement said.
The NACC Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner involved with the original decision will not participate in the new investigation into the five public servants and one public official involved with Robodebt.
An unlawful scheme
Robodebt was an automated debt recovery scheme launched by the former Coalition government which relied on the averaging of yearly income data from the tax office with fortnightly income data reported by welfare recipients.
If the system identified a discrepancy from this data-matching, a “please explain” notice was automatically sent to the welfare recipient, with more than 500,000 letters sent in total.
This process was revealed to be fundamentally flawed and to regularly generate inaccurate or non-existent debts.
The federal government eventually settled a class action over the scheme for $1.8 billion, including the refunding of all debts and $112 million in compensation.
The Royal Commission into Robodebt found the scheme was a “costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms”, and that the debt recovery process was a “crude and cruel mechanism” that was “neither fair nor legal”.
A sealed section of the final report recommended the referral of six individuals to the NACC for potential investigation.
A subsequent investigation by the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) found that 12 public servants had breached their obligations nearly 100 times in relation to their overseeing of Robodebt, including the two responsible departmental heads.
These two former secretaries and other officials who are no longer in the public service cannot be punished by the APSC, while those that remain have been demoted or fined but kept their jobs.
