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Post by Banjo on Mar 28, 2015 7:52:17 GMT 7
It's about the Feds passing the cost of locking these people up and treating them to the States, currently the institution has access to their DSP to offset this, much the same as the way some nursing homes work.
It can be traced back to the evil plan to get the States to lobby for an increase to the GST because the Commonwealth is giving them less money.
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Post by Banjo on Apr 20, 2015 14:38:13 GMT 7
The Daily Telegraph and “member of a couple” decisions On 18 April the Daily Telegraph published an online article about Centrelink decisions with respect to relationship status – whether a person is single or a member of a couple – under the heading “Couples fake relationship status to rort millions in Centrelink payments”. The substance of the article combined discussion of a recent Administrative Appeals Tribunal decision in relation to Ms Tania Sharp, with some statistics in relation to Centrelink investigations into relationship status. It said that “last year” 634 people were found to owe $7million because of “falsely declaring their relationship status to get additional payments from Centrelink”. It went on to say that Centrelink investigators conducted 120 investigations into people suspected of being an undeclared relationship and 16 people were referred to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.
I think it is fair to say that the article seeks to create an impression of widespread and deliberate “rorting” of the system by people concealing relationships. Whether I am right about that or not, I think a more accurate and complete picture of this issue than the one presented by the Daily Telegraph is necessary for there to be a sensible discussion of this issue.
Centrelink decisions about relationship status
The assessment of relationship status – whether a person is single or a member of a couple – is fundamental to the Department of Human Services/Centrelink’s administration of the system of income support and family assistance payments. Most payments are paid at a lower basic rate to a person who is a member of a couple, and a person’s rate of payment is affected by their partner’s income and assets.
Woman are particularly affected by Centrelink decisions with respect to relationship status, especially as the main recipients of payments for parents such as parenting payment single for single mothers.
A Centrelink decision that a woman is partnered can have a very significant impact on her current payments and, if Centrelink decide that she has been partnered during a past period when she was paid as a single person, it can lead to a debt. In practice, debts caused by Centrelink’s reassessment of a woman’s relationship status are among the larger debts it raises. In fact it usually results in multiple debts – a debt of her main income support payment (parenting payment single or newstart allowance usually) and a debt of family tax benefit, and other family payments, for each financial year Centrelink has reassessed.
Centrelink may refer these cases to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions for possible charges. In practice this is rare.
Tania Sharp’s case
Before moving to the wider issue of relationship status, I think a correction to the Daily Telegraph’s description of Ms Sharp and her case is warranted.
Ms Sharp appealed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal against Centrelink’s decision that she was a member of a couple with the father of her two younger children. That decision is publicly available here. The tribunal agreed with Centrelink’s decision that he was her partner and the cancellation of her parenting payment single. The Daily Telegraph said that the tribunal found that she was “lying”, as well as linking her case with comments about “welfare fraud” by Minister for Human Services, Marise Payne, and a claim about rorting.
For the record, although this blog can hardly repair the damage to Ms Sharp’s reputation from an article in the Daily Telegraph, the tribunal expressly and clearly decided that Ms Sharp had not deliberately sought to conceal a relationship and said that she “did not deliberately set out to create a false impression of being single”. The article also neglects to make clear that Ms Sharp told Centrelink when she began to live with the father of her two children.
The statistics about Centrelink “member of a couple” investigations and decisions
The statistics about “member of a couple” reviews and investigations for the 2013-2014 year are publicly available, as the matter was raised during the Senate estimates process.
The article states that 634 people incurred $7 million in debts due to “falsely declaring their relationship status”, the implication being that this was deliberately done “to get additional payments from Centrelink”. This statement is incorrect or misleading in three main respects.
First, the article is wrong to say that 634 people incurred these debts. There are some discrepancies in the available information about the number of debts for the 2013-2014 year, but the Daily Telegraph appear to be relying on the information referred to above. According to it, there were 634 debts not 634 people. The number of people is almost certainly less than 634 because, as the Department of Human Services’ own note to these statistics says, “a single review/investigation can result in more than one debt”. As I said, in a standard case involving a woman on parenting payment single, she will face a debt of parenting payment and may also have debts of family assistance payments and/or other payments if she has moved between different income support payments in the period of investigation (eg from parenting payment single to newstart allowance when her youngest child turned 8).
Second, these are statistics about debts not about whether a person made a false statement to Centrelink to get additional money they were not entitled to. A Centrelink debt may be incurred without the person making a deliberately false statement or intending to obtain money they were not entitled to. In Ms Sharp’s case, for example, the tribunal found that she had not deliberately sought to mislead Centrelink about her relationship status. Some of the 634 debts are, in fact, unlikely to be due to the person deliberately setting out to obtain money to which they were not entitled. For example, the total of all sickness allowance debts (of which there were less than 20) was only $1,362 and the total of all youth allowance job seeker debts was $225. In other words, these debts were very small, a matter of a few weeks payments at most, the most likely explanation being that the person told Centrelink about becoming partnered, but did so after a short delay and incurred a debt as a result.
Third, these statistics about debts do not show whether those debts were appealed and, if appealed, whether they were later set aside. In other words, Centrelink’s decision about the debt may have been wrong. The article does not make any mention of this. As some of those debts may have been appealed in the 2014-2015 period, we cannot say for sure how many of these particular debts were appealed and changed, but we can get an indication from appeal statistics for member of a couple decisions from the same 2013-2014 year, which are also publicly available.
In 2013-2014 there were, for example, 2593 appeals to the first level of appeal about member of a couple decisions (including those that resulted in a debt). This is a review by a senior officer within Centrelink called an authorised review officer. The Department reports that in 48% or 1397 of those appeals the decision was changed, by which it says it means set aside (ie the debt was found to have been incorrectly raised as the person was not a member of a couple) or varied (ie the debt was varied, usually due to a reduction in the period the person is determined to have been in a relationship).
The average rate at which authorised review officers changed decisions in 2013-2014 was 34.7% according to the Department of Human Services annual report. In other words, Centrelink decisions about whether someone was in a member of a couple relationship were found to be incorrect by Centrelink’s own decision-makers at a significantly higher rate than other decisions.
The Daily Telegraph article has none of this information, which could tend to create the impression that all of Centrelink’s decisions about relationship status are found to be correct. In fact, the article goes further and implies that the decisions are all attributable to people “falsely declaring their relationship status to get additional payments from Centrelink”. Decisions about relationship status are complex and therefore more likely to be in error than other Centrelink decisions. One cause of error is when the Centrelink decision-maker fails to take into account the woman’s cultural and religious background. An example of an Administrative Appeals Tribunal decision in such a case in which this Centre acted for the woman, setting aside Centrelink’s decision to raise debts totalling more than $92,000, is here.
In my experience, even where the debts were the result of deliberately concealing relationship status some of those women incurred those debts under serious threat of violence from abusive partners. At a time when the government and media are supposed to be paying heightened attention to the impact of family violence in our community that is also worth keeping in mind.
It is also worth noting that the article’s reference to 120 investigations by Centrelink is also misleading. Centrelink distinguish between reviews and investigations and to get a sense of the scale and effectiveness of its investigations you need to look at the total number of investigations and reviews. According to the information from the article draws its statistics, there were in fact 31,621 reviews/investigations completed in 2013-2014 which did not result in any debt or reduction in payment, while 1249 did result in a debt or reduction in payment.
Nor does the evidence necessarily suggest that there is a large amount of undetected fraud with respect to relationship status. In 2012-2013 there were 8,437 reviews resulting in 418 debts. In 2013-2014 the Department more than double its level of reviews to 18,368 but this resulted in a 50% increase in debts raised to 634. The lack of a liner relationship between reviews and debts raised is at least suggestive that there is in fact a high level of compliance with respect to relationship status by people, especially women, receiving payments.
Finally, it is always worth putting all this in the perspective of numbers of people receiving these payments. As at 30 June 2013, there were 255,411 people receiving parenting payment single. These statistics suggest that nearly all of those women are honest people.
Deliberate fraud in relation to relationship status is a very serious matter, as it can result in a person receiving literally $100,000 in public money they are not entitled to. Where there are aggravating circumstances, such as the creation of false documents, prosecution may be appropriate. But the Daily Telegraph article simply does not give a true picture of the scale of this issue.
Matthew Butt, Principal lawyer, Welfare Rights Centre
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