Centrelink has, for the first time, accepted blame for the huge delay in processing ‘Student Payment’ claims; a delay that affected nearly 250,000 young Australians.
The acting chief of the Department of Human Services, Grant Tidswell, accepted responsibility before a Senate committee, basically saying, “our bad", the
SMH reports.
It is a significant left turn by the department,
which had previously stood by the line that all claims were handled properly, and that the delays were due to “unforeseen high demand.”
Turns out, not so much.
Tidswell - in contrast to statements made by the Minister for Human Services, Alan Tudge - confirmed that the ‘Youth Allowance’ workload was “approximately similar to what we’ve had in previous years”.
"We got caught out in terms of some backlog, particularly around March and thereabouts,” he said.
"We've put a considerable number of extra staff on and we should have done that earlier and that was our mistake, we didn't take the right action early enough.”
As a result of the backlog, students had to wait up to four months to hear if they were eligible for 'Student Payment', causing many to miss out on attending uni or TAFE this year.
Nonetheless, there will be no external inquiry into the debacle; a revelation that angered Labor’s human services spokesman Doug Cameron, who is calling for an independent inquiry into their “stuff-up”.
In March, the backlog of claims peaked at 90,000, following the technological breakdown of Centrelink’s ironically-titled ‘Customer First’ software. (Tidswell also conceded that Centrelink shouldn't have migrated to a new operating system during a peak time for claims.)
It was reported last week that Centrelink flat-out
"auto-rejected" up to 30,000 applications to speed up processing.
Sources alleged that “lightly trained casuals” were brought on to deal with the backlog, leading to “auto-rejected” claims (the result of staff failing to check supporting documentation or check in with applicants).
The sources also suggested that the quality checking process was “turned off” to help speed through the workload.
Though Centrelink insists that the number of rejected claims in 2016 (approximately 40 per cent) is consistent with other years, insiders encourage those who had their ‘Student Payment’ requests rebuffed to
appeal the decision as soon as possible, given the circumstances laid out above.
In the recent
Federal Budget announcement, Centrelink was informed of $80 million in cuts and 810 job losses over the next year.
Photo: Fox.
Yess!!!