Online Compliance Intervention
Online Compliance Intervention (OCI), also informally known as the Robodebt scheme, or simply Robodebt, was a method of automated debt assessment and recovery employed by Services Australia as part of its Centrelink payment compliance program.
Data Matching has been undertaken by the Australian government for over 50 years.
In 1990, the Australian government passed legislation enabling Data Matching for the purposes of verifying incomes of welfare recipients. This legislation detailed how the data held by the Australian Tax Office would be shared with the Department of Social Security (now Services Australia). This sharing of data was to enable identification of people who had likely provided incorrect or out of date information to Centrelink under the Social Security Act 1991. The legislation covering the use of data matching and issuing of debt included a limitation of 9 cycles per year, with Centrelink drawing on data collected by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) since the Data Matching Act 1990 was passed.
The process of debt investigation and recovery remained largely unchanged after the 1990 legislation, with minor changes owing to back end systems changing. The core system that was implemented in the 1984 Social Security and Reparation Act remained.
In 2001, Services Australia (then the Department of Human Services) piloted a program which compared a customer's Centrelink income details with ATO data, to identify discrepancies in the information provided to Centrelink. Where there was a discrepancy, Services Australia would decide if the customer had been overpaid and had a debt that should be recovered. This program (known as the Income Matching System, or IMS) was fully rolled out in 2004. In May 2009, a Tax Garnishee Project looked at ways of automating the system to streamline debt collection using a set of algorithms.
"I think most people would expect that we have a rigorous checking system, and covert surveillance is one of our, as I say, one of the weapons in our armoury. We have data matching, where we check our records against the Tax Office's records to make sure that is all adds up and there's not people who are paying tax on a job who are also claiming welfare." - Chris Bowen, 7 April 2010.
In June 2011, the Gillard Government introduced an automated system to cross-check data between the Australian Taxation Office and Centrelink, in order to "identify individuals who wrongly received welfare payments when their earnings made them ineligible". Proposed by the Minister for Human Services Tanya Plibersek and Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten, these changes were expected to gain "an extra $71 million to the budget". The measure was forecast to identify 63,000 former customers over four years in addition to the 43,000 captured in 2009-10.
"If people fail to come to an arrangement to settle their debts, the Government has a responsibility to taxpayers to recover that money." - Tanya Plibersek, 29 June 2011.
"The automation of this process will free up resources and result in more people being referred to the tax garnishee process, retrieving more outstanding debt on behalf of taxpayers." - Bill Shorten, 29 June 2011.
This scheme aimed to replace the formerly manual system of calculating overpayments and issuing debt notices to welfare recipients with an automated data-matching system that compared Centrelink records with averaged income data from the Australian Taxation Office.