Just wanted to let you all know that I appealed my debt and I won.
I am elated.
Mind you, it took 2.5 months of stress and 25 hours of my time digging up time sheets, creating Excel spreadsheets, combing through financial records from more than two years ago.
I received 2 payments after a redundancy in that year (2014) and then started a fixed term job so that I did not receive any more payments whilst I continued to put my forms in for 6 fortnightly periods until cancelled. I then claimed again for 3 more payments at the end of that financial year (working full time in between for the majority) and subsequently have not been on Centrelink since.
They of course, averaged out my income as a casual contract employee and also assumed my benefits were for the whole year.
I also made the initial mistake of checking against my ATO slips for the PAYG group income and saying 'yup' that's right, instead of nailing down the precise dates which they then manually recalculated.
I always knew that I did not owe a cent as I fully declared any income earned at the time.
This has been a huge waste of my time and more time has been spent ringing Centrelink, uploading documents, compiling evidence to 'prove' this robo-debt is fake.
The government is simply taking up Centrelink's administrative time as well as mine.
This really needs to stop and they need to fix the process until it's reliable.
It appalls me how many people are paying just because it's too difficult or cumbersome to fight.
However, I want people to know that if you persist, you can have your debt erased.
I'm so glad that mine was sorted out eventually.