I'm in insecure employment in education, already on a very tight budget and felt I had no choice but to begin making repayments while appealing. Despite multiple phone calls I am yet to fully understand why I have incurred a debt & therefore what evidence is needed to dispute.
I'm outraged that I'm doing the compliance work for them by attempting to chase up old payslips during the busy Christmas break & public holiday closures. I'm stressed because if this automated method isn't changed I will be facing the same pressures again this year and the following year and the year after that as well.
I'm disgusted in the whole process. C/Link & ATO already have detailed information of all my earnings & I already jumped through all the necessary hoops when reporting at the time.
Regular C/Link staff (& also Compliance) are unable to give me a 'satisfactory explanation'. Something about averaging?? The name of the employer might be different? Does this mean the computer thinks I've earned more than I have? The system isn't set-up to deal with irregular casual/short-term employment and the automated system doesn't match with ATO financial year dates.
They shouldn't be able to raise a debt based on an anomaly/discrepancy until after this has been manually checked (which I gather was the previous method before automation). It's an 'alleged' debt - 21 days was in no way sufficient time to gather evidence of innocence against allegations of fraud.