I received the "income reported does not match your tax return" notice in October 2015 regarding youth allowance I'd claimed between September 2011 and October 2013.
Based on the information they'd received they were saying I should never have received a payment even after I explained that I didn't earn above the reported amount while claiming the benefits. In my case the error was because I was a casual employee so earnt more in some parts of the year than others, and because when I graduated uni in 2013 I got a higher paying full time job for the second half of that financial year.
I asked for my case to be officially reviewed and the money I'd reported taken into account, but my appeal was rejected as I was unable to provide pay-slips for the full time I'd been on the benefit (2 - 4 years earlier at the time).
Its difficult to talk about how this has impacted my life and how I feel, thinking about it always makes me angry and depressed and I feel like the government has taken advantage of me. I now regret putting myself through uni because of what's happened and I cannot afford to take any holidays or to look for a better job because of the burden this debt has placed on me. I'm paying it back as fast as I can, but wont have re-paid my debt for at least another 10 years...
I can't really imagine how it could have been handled any worse.
From the start I was treated as a criminal, and forced to prove that I hadn't provided incorrect information from years earlier.
I've had people working at centrelink tell me that it is probably their fault, but that I would still need to pay them back even if I could prove it.
But by far the worst was having my appeal rejected simply because I didn't hold on to 4 year old pay slips.