Dear Mr Jongen.
I haven't even checked my Centrelink account in years it is only because of all the news about Centrelink recently that I decided to log in to see if I had been slapped with one of these debts and sure enough I had been.
Apparently I owe over a thousand dollars from a one month period when I wasn't even paid that amount in said period so clearly something was wrong.
Centrelink sends out thousands of letters claiming the majority of people who received payments from them in the past several years owe them money and then doesn't bother training their staff to be able to deal with any disputes or conduct any reviews in person!
You palm people off to a call center, that does not manually conduct a review - I had to provide the information for them! I had to take the day off work to call and have access to a computer and have payslips from 2 years ago!
All due to errors in a clearly flawed system which calculates an average of payments instead of looking at what a person has actually been paid. So now I have to dig up payslips from over 2 years ago to prove that I didn't earn that average amount that this system has generated. I had to take a day off work to go to Centrelink just to be told they cannot help me in person because they have not been trained to do so. Just to come home and have to do all the work for you because of your incompetence.
Yet even better still, you have the audacity to dismiss reports that people have been mistakenly targeted and defend such a broken system publicly and not admit fault.