Owing money to Centrelink

[Banker]

I have taken this from another forum, it just goes to show these BASTARDS at Centrelink will stop at nothing.

i apparently owe centrelink $12k, in 2003/4 i called them to inform them that i was not going to finish my course in time and inquired about what to do about my youthallowance, the rep said to extend the end date of my course online and i did. then when the time came around for me to transfer to newstart they decreed that the expected end date was invalid, reverted it and said i was overpaid youthallowance for a year and a half and wanted it back. i claimed i had recieved advice pertaining otherwise and if that was the case i should be put retroactively onto newstart and paid the difference in allowance. they denied and demanded i pay them back.
i appealed but because i did not have a receipt number for the call made in 2003/4 that i had no evidence and was at fault and said anything that old would have been archieved and they were very unhelpful about assisting me in accessing those archives for me to find my contact record. the message i got was 'we wont dig up our archives to help you annul a debt'.
when i got a job the debt was sold to a debt recovery agency and i was told i could not appeal it further.

now i have returned to payments for the time being and the debt was returned from the agency. i was then told i could have appealed at any time.

what sort of action can i take and what are the legal grounds for this.
how can i get out of this in my favor, ive paid about $4k of it off already, but even just getting the debt annulled would be a win.

zgeek.com/showthread.php/94286-Owing-money-to-centrelink

[spaceyone]

Shaking my head in disbelief. I will go and leave the same comments on that site, as I will make here.

* Centrelink claimed they should not have to dig up old archived records to enable the person to verify that the error was their own.

Yes, they should have to. To prove their case, they should have to first disprove his claim that he did call them, and receive the advice that he says that he did.

* Because he had no receipt number, he had no proof of the call.

Again, we stress the importance of asking for receipt numbers, for reasons such as this.

However, I still forget to ask at times and on occassion have even been refused one.

For simple matters such as his own enquiry, you would assume a receipt number isn't all that important. Now he finds out that it was all that could have saved him.

* Centrelink being allowed to sell a debt! How is that allowed to happen, is our government so broke that it has to try to recoup monies from their mistakes in that way?

How can Centrelink be allowed to continue to do this to people? Go through payments from many years ago, and suddenly send out a bill, without proper consultation and agreement from the person involved, and without them being given one chance to put the blame back onto who really created the debt?


I had a credit card debt I could not pay. I had been using the card to support myself and family while I was sick and unemployed. Since I never got better, nor able to hold down a job, I defaulted on the debt and instructed them to take me to court (which means they have to stop charging interest once it has been listed for same).

The debt for the card was $5,000 + another $1,000 in interest and charges during the time that I was not making payments.

A few months later, I received a call from a finance company who advised that they had purchased my debt, and were asking for payment of the whole $6,000. I told them I might fix it up one day, once I had recovered from my injuries or received compensation for same.

I searched the net to find out what it meant for me to have the debt now with someone else. I found a post stating that if you could find out how much the purchaser had paid for the debt, you only had to pay them that amount, and they then had to mark the whole debt as paid in full, and restore your credit rating.

The next time the company phoned me, I asked him about same. He wanted to know where I had obtained the information from. When I replied it was from the internet, he scoffed that 'there are a lot of backyard lawyers on the net'. When I suggested that it seemed like a valid post to me, he demanded to know which web site I had gotten it from.

I paid nothing and didn't hear from them again for a while. Later, they sent me an offer to settle the debt for the amount of $1,500. I am not sure if that is what they paid for it, or if they were still trying to make some profit out of my default.

I paid them nothing, and when they ring me about it, I merely comment that it was pretty stupid of them to purchases a debt which was not being serviced. Therefore their problem, not mine.

I have no agreements with this new owner of my debt, nothing to say that I would pay them money. As far as I can see, they don't have a leg to stand on in court. I had indicated to the first company, with whom I had an agreement to make repayments, that I could not, and therefore would not, be paying it. Nothing to do with any other third parties, as far as I am concerned.

From what I have researched about debts to financial institutions, once you are on welfare, they pretty much can't touch you. Most judges agree that we are only given enough money to live on (no longer quite true) and therefore we have nothing left over to repay any debts.

[spaceyone]

I have taken this post from the same thread and website.


Similar happened to me yonks ago (2000-2001). I was getting paid ~ $60 per fortnight from centrelink. When I started a job, on my first day, I waltzed down to centrelink and happily withdrew my application. WELL..... The centrelink dude said "we'll keep you on the system in case you don't pass probation, and if we don't hear from you, it will just be cancelled"..

For the next 3 years, they paid ~$60 into my account each fortnight, which I genuinely didn't notice ($4k total) and called me one day and told them I owed them money.

I was shocked and complained to my dad, who called them. I was able to trace the day I 'cancelled' my allowance, as it was the 1st day of my new job, and they conceded that i did come in to discuss cancelling.

my Dad said "well.. It's your mistake, he's not repaying any money" and hung up. That's the last I ever heard from them.

Good riddance centrelink.


How it is that some people get away with getting them off their backs this easily and others don't?

These people refused to play ball and Centrelink let them walk away, with the money still in their pockets.

The original poster, tried to work with them to exhonerate himself and settle the matter to everyone's satisfaction. Yet he got shafted, and continues to be shafted.