Staff inside the Centrelink unit responsible for income reviews and eligibility assessments warned officials from the Department of Human Services that automated data matching would lead to incorrect debts being issued to low-income and vulnerable Australians, an insider has revealed.
If the government was a private company it would go out of business or be shut down by regulators for fraud over the Centrelink debacle, says former Digital Transformation Office head Paul Shetler.
Launched in July, the system was intended to streamline the detection of overpayments made to welfare recipients and automatically issue notices of any discrepancies.
The media and Reddit threads have since been inundated with complaints from people who say they are being accused of being "welfare cheats" without cause, thanks to faulty data.
The trouble lies with the algorithm's apparent difficulty accurately matching tax office data with Centrelink records, according to the Guardian, although department spokesperson Hank Jongen told Mashable it remains "confident" in the system.
