Centrelink's top boss has conceded that internal mistakes led to the huge Youth Allowance debacle of recent months that had hundreds of thousands of young people denied their benefits for up to four months.
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The acting chief of the giant Department of Human Services, which runs the welfare agency, gave a frank account to a Senate committee of what went wrong, accepted responsibility and vowed to do better.
The evidence of acting departmental secretary Grant Tidswell marked a dramatic departure from the line previously maintained by DHS and its minister, that an unforeseen surge in applications for Youth Allowance caused the system to break down.
Mr Tidswell, acting in the role while permanent boss Kathryn Campbell took time off for reservist military service, also confirmed that the Youth Allowance workload this year was "approximately similar to what we've had in previous years".
The acting secretary also took responsibility for the decision to migrate to a new operating system to process claims at a time when a "peak and a bubble" was expected.
But there would be no independent inquiry into what went wrong.
Labor's human services spokesman Doug Cameron remained unhappy, telling the DHS officials that their reaction to their own "stuff-up" was "unacceptable" and called for an independent inquiry into the saga.
The backlog for payment claims was now back to normal level, Mr Tidswell said, after it peaked at about 92,000 in March, several weeks into the first term of the academic year, causing widespread hardship and distress to students and their families.
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Centrelink appointed a special national manager to manage the student payment crisis through a command centre – a similar reaction to the Brisbane floods emergency in 2011 – and drafted in at least 650 extra staff to try to cope with what was described as the agency's worst customer service crisis.
Centrelink and its political boss, Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge, repeatedly said the delays were caused by "unprecedented" demand for student payments this year after nearly 250,000 young people lodged claims.
But Mr Tidswell told Senate estimates committee late on Friday night that the department's hierarchy made key mistakes in trying to manage the annual rush of students and would-be students claiming benefits.
"We got caught out in terms of some backlog, particularly around March and thereabouts," the acting secretary told the committee.
"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.
"We've taken that action."
"There'll be no external inquiry but we will be having conversations at the executive table about making sure that we don't allow this to happen again."
Mr Tidswell said the large numbers of applications early in the year always presented problems but conceded the department's responses could have been better.
"We're now below the figures we had this time last year, every year there's this peak and bubble because students enter the system," he said.
"We've got a lot of work we have to do, about 44 per cent of all the claims we process turn out to be invalid.
"We get people trying to get Youth Allowance, we get a whole lot of other claims come to us that are incomplete and so it's challenging for us to keep on top of that workload but we have been making great inroads into the volume and the number at hand and we're back to where we need to be at this stage."
