Newsflash everybody: Hank Jongen is not the boss of Centrelink.
And the public servant who has acted as front man for the "robo-debt" crisis engulfing the nation's welfare system is not in charge of the Centrelink's giant parent department, Human Services, either.
The Minister for Human Services, Alan Tudge, still isn’t across the detail of his bungled robo debt recovery program, contradicting his senior minister and his own department.
Linda Burney, Shadow Minister for Human Services, raised concerns following a number of confused and inconsistent statements made by Mr Tudge since he returned from holidays just this week.
Centrelink staff working on the agency's controversial debt claw-back program have been told to ignore errors in calculations and push through debts they know are incorrect, according to an anonymous letter written by a person claiming to be a Centrelink compliance officer.
Activist group GetUp! released the eight-page letter it received from a person claiming to have worked on Centrelink's automated data-matching project, known as the Online Compliance Intervention.
Shadow Human Services Minister Linda Burney has asked the Australian Federal Police to investigate Human Services Minister Alan Tudge over the leaking of a Centrelink client’s personal information to journalists, alleging he broke social security laws.
Complainants range from ABC 7.30 Report presenter, Leigh Sales, to disability pensioners and victims of Centrelink's debt recovery operations.
But could it be that sometimes the agency is being unfairly castigated?
Review, due to be tabled this month, examines whether ‘sound processes’ were established to support fraud prevention.
People pursued by Centrelink over its controversial "robo-debts" are being denied the protection of Australian consumer law, a Parliamentary inquiry has been told.
The welfare agency is exempt from laws and guidelines covering debt collection by private businesses, "even the much maligned banks", according to the chief executive of Victorian community organisation Family Care, David Tennant.
The Centrelink fiasco keeps getting worse, writes Ben Eltham. Now the rogue department has leaked private information about ordinary citizens who have the temerity to criticise it.
The man who led the first audit of Centrelink data-matching in 1999 says the government has known for decades that the process was prone to error without human oversight.
John Mayger, a retired auditor with the Department of Social Services, said his audit showed that detecting overpayments through data-matching was problematic without a high degree of staff vetting to provide an effective balance.
Centrelink's phone lines are about to get better… no really, they're meant to, but you just have to wait a little longer for it to happen.
That's the line I'm getting from the Department of Human Services, which has copped a hammering in recent weeks over the government's controversial robo debt recovery scheme and its high error rates in clawing back overpaid welfare payments.
