My debt comprised of two issues. Part 1 being that I had incorrectly reported my income as my received income and not my pre-tax income. This was a mistake and I agreed to pay back the difference. Part 2 was an accusation that I had recieved over-payment as I had not reported my income for a period of several months. This is impossible as in order to recieve my youth-allowance I have to report my income fortnightly. Centrelink accused me of having never declared working for my employer, although they had the company in their system as a previous employer that I had reported to. I was issued an ADEX breakdown, however they refused to fill in the columns pertaining to "Method of Reporting", "Declared Income", "Apportioned Actual Income", "Actual Income as per pay-slips",and "Employer". When I requested access to this information I was ignored and issued with a notice that the debt would be taken from my youth allowance effective immediately. I spent 5 months crying over the stress of having to repay $8,000 for a debt I did not do anything to deserve, feeling helpless that even though I had tried and tried I had no way to prove that I was innocent because I had not kept screen shots of my income reporting from 4 years prior. My university grades were affected, and this was accentuated further by having to pick up extra work to compensate for my loss of income from the debt repayments. The anxiety and stress this has caused me is unbearable. I am a full-time university student who is working as hard as I can to keep myself afloat, and the government has given me a debt I am not responsible for, and then begun deducting repayments from my allowance when I have not even agreed to the debt.
I am mortified. It is impossible to have faith and trust in a government who falsely accuses it's nations students of fraud and then begins taking their money without their consent. The government has issued debts in a time period when they advised people it was unnecessary to keep their payslips, and yet in order to over-turn the debts these are what is required. They do not even allow full access to the information they used to calculate the debts, and when you request this information you are ignored and they begin taking repayments anyway. It is terrifying having no control over your finances and feeling as though you are a criminal when you have done nothing wrong.