page_title: Robodebt scheme
section_title: Inception
hierarchical_section_title: Robodebt scheme / Inception
caption_attribution_description: English: The Hon Christian Porter MP, Minister for Social Services
context_page_description: The Robodebt scheme, often called simply Robodebt or Robo-debt, is the colloquial name for the Online Compliance Intervention, a method of automated debt recovery formerly employed by Services Australia as part of its Centrelink compliance program. Put in place in July 2016 and announced to the public in December of the same year, the 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.
  The scheme has been the subject of considerable controversy, having been criticized by media, academics, advocacy groups and politicians due to allegations of false or incorrectly calculated debt notices being issued, concerns over impacts on the physical and mental health of debt notice recipients and questions around the lawfulness of the scheme. Robodebt has been the subject of an investigation by the Commonwealth Ombudsman, two Senate committee inquiries and several legal challenges.
context_section_description: In 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". The plan was proposed by the Minister for Human Services Tanya Plibersek and assistant treasurer Bill Shorten, and sought to gain "an extra $71 million to the budget".
  Measures to create budgetary savings by pursuing outstanding debts and investigating cases of fraud in the Australian welfare system were first flagged by the Abbott Government in the 2015 Australian federal budget. Following the 2015 Liberal Party Leadership Spill and 2016 Australian federal election, the Turnbull government implemented an overhaul of the federal welfare budget in an effort to crack down on Centrelink overpayments believed to have occurred between 2010 and 2013 under the Gillard government. 
  In the system established in 2011, Centrelink staff manually checked customer records against data provided by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), generating debt notices at an estimated rate of about 20,000 a year. In July 2016, the manual system was replaced with the Online Compliance Intervention, an automated data-matching technique with less human oversight, capable of identifying and issuing computer-generated debt notices to potential welfare recipients who had been overpaid. Announced to the public in December 2016, by then-Minister for Social Services Christian Porter, this new automated debt recovery scheme – given the colloquial name 'robodebt' by the media – was estimated to be capable of issuing debt notices at a rate of 20,000 a week.
caption: Christian Porter Portrait, Minister for Social Services (September 2015 - December 2017)
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