From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven Am. It was twenty twenty when the government first discovered that a glitch in its systems was wrongfully kicking welfare recipients off their payments, but rather than fixing the error than and there, the department did nothing about it for three years. In that time, ten people died. Whether their deaths were the result of suicide or destitution from having their payments cut,
Services Australia won't say. Today Senior reporter for the Saturday Paper, Rick Morton with his exclusive story about the ministers who failed to act protecting the interests of private companies over the vulnerable. It's Wednesday, February twenty six, So Rick, tell me where this story begins for you.
So I've been covering this for almost a year now and there was always something kind of fishy about it, because you know, like in January last year. So in twenty twenty four, the Department of Employment they kind of sheepishly admit that there's this problem with the IT system that deals with employment services, right and they say, oh,
the IT system stuffed up. There was a bug and it's affected about one thousand people who were hit with financial penalties or had their welfare payment cut off entirely because of this IT system. But then by the time I was writing about it in July, the number of people affected is revised up again, so now it's about thirteen hundred people. And then come November, this source from the government says they're about to announce this new issue. And then also, by the way, all those IT glitches,
the numbers that are affected by those has gone up again. Now, well, all of this is happening. People of course, are watching it very carefully, and one of those is this guy called Jeremy Poxen, who's a welfare rights Activisty has been around for ages now, really and he knew about these issues of his because there was bits and pieces being fed out in the media, and so Jeremy says, well, I don't think they're being forthcoming. I'm going to FOI, you know, Lodger freedom of information request?
Right? What did that uncover?
So the briefings he got back, it's fair to say they were quite shocking because there were eighty pages in there of ministery or briefs to both Tony Burke, the former Employment Minister, and the current Employment Minister. Murray Watt from the Department of Employment about the issues with the IT system, and it showed that the problem was first identified in April twenty twenty and the department just didn't do anything about it for.
Another three years.
Okay, and so what was the actual problem? What was the kind of technical glitch or whatever in the system that had caused all of this to happen.
I mean, let me just start by explaining this is all about Workforce Australia, right. So Ever since Howard privatized employment service providers, the government has paid private, nonprofit and for profit providers to administer a compliance regime around you know, if you're on a job seeker payment, you have to do mutual obligations, so you either have to do work for the doll or you have to do some kind
of training or being study. And if you don't, and if you don't look for work a certain number of jobs every month, then you're going to get penalized.
Let's learn more about the targeted Compliance framework.
And in twenty eighteen the Coalition introduces the new Targeted Compliance Framework and it is an insanely complicated.
Traffic light system. I guess is the best way.
To describe what it is about how to penalize people who are not meeting their mutual obligations, who don't have a reasonable excuse. In the words of the Department, your.
Job plan will include your mutual obligation requirements tailored to your individual circumstances. You need to meet and report on these requirements, including meeting your monthly points target on the Workforce Australia website.
It's a rout Goldberg machine.
It's like if this, then that, and if you don't do this, then you spend ninety a penalty zone, and if you're in the penalty zone for so long, then all of these other things happen. It is so complicated, a little bit of humans oversight, but mostly it's.
An automated IT system.
And so by the time the department actually realized that people were being cut off welfare or they were being financially penalized, there were thirteen hundred of them in the end who were hit with fines, who were cut off from their payments, and that happened three thousand, four hundred different times.
Right, Okay, so there is this kind of technical stuff up in twenty twenty that the department finds out about, but doesn't do anything about for three years. In that time, there are thirteen hundred people approximately cut off their welfare payments. So at what point does the department decide to do something about this.
So that thirteen hundred, you know, those thirteen hundred.
People who were affected.
That happened mostly later on after many years, and the department only noticed it again in twenty twenty three, you know, I think it was actually around August, and then by septemb they're briefing, we need to fix this thing. And by October they've released the first fix for this IT glitch.
That was first identified in twenty twenty.
The problem is that fix created another problem trying to fix the first problem, which had almost exactly the same effect, and hit another seventy three people with wrong financial penalties or cancelation of payments that should never have happened. And in the course of briefing their ministers at that point was Tony Burke, they said that, you know, there might be an additional fifty five bugs. Since I'm quoting from THEFI briefing, our initial analysis suggests the majority of these
bugs will not have significant impact on penalties. The number of participants impacted by all bugs is still under investigation, and that's a very important point because they don't actually know right.
So at this point, the Minister, though, is being warned that there are serious problems. I suppose, so does he or the Department at this point try and do anything to fix it.
I mean, I think it would be unfair to say that the ministers are not concerned. So the Department and they're the ones who control the system, right, So they're briefing the government and in the briefing to what they say, literally I'm quoting it changes would likely require significant government investment.
Well that makes sense because it sounds like it was very broken.
It's very broken, and also we know that it is always an incredible cost. But in this case, the it is complicated, not because you know, we're trying to do quantum computing, but because the legislation is incredibly complicated. So when the Department of Employment was briefing Tony Burke on the IT clitch issue in a way that they could be sure that they wouldn't affect people unnecessarily, they came
up with two options. Option A was to basically prevent people from attracting financial penalties or cancelations in the first place, just take them out of the penalty zone after so much time. The second option was to turn off what they called the penalty zone altogether, and they didn't want to do that because doing that would actually remove the
threat of consequence. If you switch off consequences for people who don't engage, then suddenly they're not engaging with private employment service providers that the government pays about one and a half billion dollars a year in Workforce Australia to provide these services. And they said there was a financial viability problem if they turned that off, because suddenly these private operators would not be making any money from unemployed people and that was untenable.
And so what of it? Can we go back to these people rick who were cut off from their payments, What do we know about what happened to them after that?
So the government decides for people who were given financial penalties, which is you know, in some cases one week or two weeks of their payment, they can pay that back. They find those people in the system, they track them down, they give back.
I think it's something like six hundred thousand.
Dollars for the people who had their welfare payments canceled, they try and track them all down for a star there's forty one people.
They can't get a hold of these fi brief in show.
And also there are ten people who died after the welfare payments were canceled and before the government has been able to try and find them to pay the money back. Services Australia obviously learned that these people have died. We know that the glitch problem could only have led to cancelations after a long period of time, so they didn't die that long ago, and Services Australia won't tell me how they died, or whether they know how they died, or.
If they even asked how they died. That's a problem.
Because to me, there is at least the chance that maybe one of these people died because of something that happened with this system. We don't know the answer to that because they haven't investigated it.
After the break, Is the system still broken? Where is the system at now?
Rick?
Because it sounds like at every term when the department did decide to try and do something about the problem, they only created more problems. So is it actually functioning correctly now?
No, it's not so Just in generally. Just last month they had to pause mutual applications for two weeks because there was another IT glitch. I mean, there's an IT glitch every other Friday, and we know that they keep discovering these issues. Might not be the old ones, but
there's new ones. And there's a separate issue now where they're going back to one thousand people, different people who had their welfare payments cut off because the delegate for the Secretary of the Department of Employment wasn't giving due discretion to whether people would be thrust into financial hardship.
I mean, these are people who are living pretty tough lives and the people who are most likely to get in the penalty zone in this crazy system, people with a lot of comorbid things going on in their life.
They might have mental health problems, they might be living in remote indigenous communities, they might be partially considered able to work because they've got a disability, but they're not on the DSP all of these things right, and so to have your payment canceled means in practice that you get cut off your only income support and you are forbidden from reapplying for at least four weeks. Now, even when I was earning money in my twenties. If I got cut off from my payment for a week, I
wouldn't have any money. I didn't have savings, I couldn't make rent. These are people who definitely don't have money in the bank. So no, the model, the system, the it, whether it's the I or the human oversight, none of it is up to scratch. And the only people that can order a stop to it are the ministers of the crown, and that has not been done.
Well, tell me a bit more about that, then, because a lot of what you've uncovered has come through reporting and through this FOI freedom of freedom of Information request. But as you have continued to look into this, how would you characterize the official response that you've been getting from the department, from the minister.
It's sheepish, is the best way to describe it. Where they know they've done something wrong, not deliberately, but the reaction to the errors that are being found could be characterized as kind of downplane what has happened, And so it feels a little bit like on the fourth and fifth and sixth occasion where they've found an error that you might want to start to consider, as is your obligation as a public servant with duties and responsibilities under
the Act. As ministers who have the ultimate responsibility for these systems, you might want to actually consider stopping this system. All we have at the moment is they've stopped the bits that they literally cannot get away with not stopping. So they've paused cancelation of welfare payments. Great, automatically taking welfare recipients out of the penalty zone at ninety one days. Great,
But they've kept everything else. And again they don't know what else the system is or is not getting right. They've paid more than half million dollars now to Deloitte to do an external assurance review, but again the system carries on its merry way, and the comb of Onbwardsman is now investigating. But explicitly in their response to me they said, we are not looking at, you know, whether
employment Services is a good system all over. We're looking at whether the targeted compliance trainwork, which is a Coalition era policy, whether that's being implemented properly. And we had these very similar issues with Robodett, where the question was.
Always so narrow.
It was not whether this Robodet was illegal. It was not whether it was even moral. It was whether if the department had come up with a set of rules and procedures, were those rules and procedures being followed and implemented properly.
That cuts out a lot of understanding from the problem, and.
It will do so again in this case if you don't actually take a step back and go hang on a second. The IT system is not the diagnosis. It is a symptom of a wildly complicated, arcane, bureaucratic, and quite cruel system of compliance designed to force.
People into jumping through these hoops, and so far no one's taken any action on that.
Rick.
Thank you for your time, Thanks for me, I appreciate it.
Also in the news today, the Albanezi government has promised a mobile phone reception quote anywhere where Australians can see the sky. If re elected, Labour says it will introduce laws that require telcos to provide outdoor mobile coverage across all areas of Australia by twenty twenty seven, meaning an extra five million square kilometers of the country would gain service, and the Vatican says Pope Francis has shown slight improvement and has resumed some work as he battles double pneumonia
and the onset of slight kidney failure. The eighty eight year old Pontiff was admitted to hospital in Rome on February fourteen after experiencing difficulty breathing. An unnamed Vatican official has told the media the pope is now eating normally and is alert and well oriented. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. See tomorrow.