Very busy time of year, compounded by a death in the family, but the point is that it should not have happened. Centrelink asked if ATO provided data was correct for 2010/11 financial year, I responded yes it was (of course) so that income was then distributed evenly across the full year including the part of the year that we received some parenting payment, resulting in a debt of over $3000. Worse than that is the amount of time and effort to get this corrected, and the short system-imposed time-lines and pressure to start repaying debt - really, after seven years, wouldn't a few more weeks to get it right have been appropriate? I provided detailed income information from my own records, basically the same as reported to Centrelink in 2010/11 with detailed explanation of why they were wrong. Was repeatedly stonewalled, hearing "I'm sorry, I can't change that data" and "I understand, but I can't suspend or slow down the debt collection process" etc. Lodged a complaint with Centrelink and the Ombudsman. I finally got a payroll summary for the period in question from my employer (wasting their time as well as mine) and uploaded this to Centrelink as requested, who ignored it for several weeks - possibly they were busy. The last time I rang, one of their consultants manually entered all the data I had supplied which was basically the same as was originally reported. This took him at least 50 minutes but at the end of the process all was well and my original data (give or take a few cents) was back in place with no debt owing. We then had to contact the debt recovery department and cancel the repayment plan that I had been forced to agree to. So eventually a positive outcome but not without a great deal of stress and an unreasonable amount of wasted time.
Very very unhappy. This is a Government agency that is meant to help people in need on behalf of all taxpayers, and to make things so difficult for (apparently) so many people just doesn't make sense. Any programmer with an ounce of sense would have known that this data matching exercise would throw up a great many "false positives" in their hunt for fraudulent claims, and a few simple modifications and some human oversight (before sending out "you lied to Centrelink" letters) could have saved customers a lot of grief and countless hours of Centrelink staff time. I'd suggest that the programmers would have (should have if they were doing their job) passed on their concerns but were told to go ahead anyway.
I believe it quite likely that a significant number of people have just paid their incorrect debts because it was too hard or even impossible for them to to get Centrelink to correct their error. I do hope that there is a of review of all these cases so that these people can be reimbursed. I think an apology is in order as well, but that could be expecting too much.