The basic premise of the policy is sensible and well-established: that Centrelink payments should be matched against income information held by the Australian Taxation Office to identify individuals who wrongly received welfare payments when their earnings made them ineligible. Such cross-checks leading to recovery of debts had been conducted manually since the mid-1990s. In 2011, the Gillard Labor government, under Tanya Plibersek (minister of human services) and Bill Shorten (assistant treasurer), introduced an automated system of cross-matching data from the two agencies. As a result, Centrelink staff were able to identify overpayments more efficiently. The amount of recovered government debt climbed significantly.

The new policy builds on Labor's scheme but relies solely on an algorithm to identify possible double-dippers and to send them a letter without allowing staff any discretion over whom should be approached. It casts the net widely, consciously targeting many who will turn out to have done nothing wrong but allowing them the opportunity to prove their innocence by providing relevant documents. The government has justified its approach, citing the need to prevent illegal claims for assistance and the extra funds that will be added to the budget bottom line.

The policy has attracted criticism on a number of fronts. The algorithm itself is crude and simplistic. For instance, it equates average fortnightly earnings based on annual income reported to the Tax Office as equivalent to actual fortnightly earnings, overlooking the intermittent working histories of many Centrelink clients. The policy also places the onus of correcting errors on to the individual client, without acknowledging the human cost imposed on honest law-abiding citizens who are effectively accused of cheating the government and the taxpayer. Finally, the pressures on Centrelink's communication systems mean that citizens face horrendous difficulties in trying to correct their records.

While this ill-conceived operation will yield many lessons for policymakers, it also raises interesting issues in relation to government accountability. To begin with, like the scandal over parliamentary travel expenses, discussed in last month's Informant, the hostile public reaction has been greatly inflamed by timing. Robo-debt letters started arriving just before Christmas and the groundswell of public protest grew steadily over the holiday season. The story, with its continuous stream of heart-wrenching personal cases, was a godsend to political journalists desperate for copy during the dog days of the summer break, when governments generate so little news.

Timing also caught ministers on the hop. When the media storm gathered pace in the days immediately after new year, the responsible minister, Alan Tudge, was on holiday and could not be reached for comment. Filling in for him, the Minister for Social Services, Christian Porter, defended the robo-debt letters as meeting the government's policy objectives and "working incredibly well". Though Porter was the senior minister in the portfolio, the continuing absence of Tudge, the sponsor of the policy and long-time advocate of getting tough on welfare fraud, drew mounting criticism. When he returned to work the following week, it was to headlines such as "Centrelink minister finally emerges, says everything is fine".

That a minister could be criticised for not returning from vacation until the second week of January is a sign of changing expectations. At that time of year, most of Australia's movers and shakers are only halfway through their summer break, still holidaying overseas or looking forward to meeting up with friends and acquaintances at the tennis, which has not yet begun. They would look on Tudge's return to Canberra, about January 10, as unluckily early not unconscionably late. These days, however, the news media operate on a continuous cycle, not only 24/7 but also 12/12.

Failure to recognise fully that the media's interest in holding governments accountable does not take a summer break might help to explain why both ministers, Porter and then Tudge, were slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the problems facing the robo-debt policy. Still partly in vacation mode, they may have hoped the holidaying public could be fobbed off with bland assurances that the policy was running smoothly as planned.

Tudge may have also taken false comfort from the fact Centrelink has its own designated spokesman, Hank Jongen, who often takes the lead in publicly explaining and defending the agency's actions. Jongen's position, as a named spokesman, is unusual in the Australian Public Service. The only recent parallel is the role played by Sandi Logan, who was the prominent public voice of the Immigration Department from 2005 until 2013 when he was moved on by the new minister, Scott Morrison. For the most part, the task of explaining and justifying policy is properly undertaken by ministers, not public servants. On occasions where a politically neutral official view is called for, the appropriate person is either the departmental secretary, identified by name, or an anonymous agency spokesperson.

Jongen's role can be understood within the evolution of Centrelink, which he joined when it was first established by the incoming Howard government in 1997 as a stand-alone delivery agency. Its creation was part of the then fashion for executive agencies pioneered by the "next steps" agencies in Britain. The rationale for executive agencies was that service delivery should be separated from direct political control. Governments and ministers (the "purchasers") should be responsible for setting and funding general policy while executive agencies (the "providers"), under independent chief executives, would be separately responsible for implementing policy efficiently and effectively.

In that context, it made sense for Centrelink, without a minister officially responsible for its day-to-day operations, to look for new ways to communicate with its clients, now badged as "customers". Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Since that time, Jongen has proved himself to be an able communicator and advocate for Centrelink in its manifold interfaces with the community. He is active on social media and clearly helps many members of the public find their way around the agency's complex systems.

Centrelink, however, is no longer a separate agency at arm's length from ministers. Indeed, it probably never was. As the British soon discovered, Westminster expectations do not tolerate ministers who wash their hands of responsibility for administrative performance. After a few high-profile cases of blame-shifting, the Blair government reimposed full ministerial responsibility for executive agencies. The agencies have remained as separate organisations focused on service delivery but ministers take responsibility for their actions in the standard way.

Similar thinking underpinned the inclusion of Centrelink in the new Department of Human Services in 2004. Centrelink would continue as a separate delivery agency, along with Medicare and other constituent agencies, but would come under direct ministerial control, albeit under a separate minister for human services.

Being part of a departmental structure makes Jongen's role as designated spokesman more anomalous, particularly when it involves defending government policy. For example, in the latest controversy over the robo-debt letters, he has been in the thick of public argument, expressing confidence in the online compliance system and the checking procedures. On several occasions, he has argued that the letters are not debt letters but merely lawful requests for information. The alleged "error" rate of 20 per cent is not an error rate at all.

These are all arguable positions but, in the current context, they are also highly controversial, not to say partisan. It is Tudge, as minister, or other senior ministers and the Prime Minister, who should be expected to make this case for the government. Allowing Jongen to mount a defence on behalf of Centrelink gives the impression that Centrelink, not the government, is responsible for the policy. This impression is reinforced by the fact that Jongen is often identified as "general manager" as if he were the agency head. (The department has about 30 "general managers" and its organisational chart lists Jongen merely as "departmental spokesperson".)

No doubt ministers are happy to have Jongen draw some of the hostile political flak away from themselves and towards the hapless bureaucrats in Centrelink. But the robo-debt crisis is a classic illustration of the need for ministers to take full responsibility for both policy and implementation. Ministers have certainly determined the general directions. They have looked for significant budgetary savings while depriving Centrelink of the staffing resources needed to administer the policy fairly and compassionately. As members of a right-of-centre government, they naturally lack empathy with welfare recipients and have thus encouraged a tough-minded attitude among loyal senior officials.

No doubt some of the failure is due to bureaucratic incompetence, which will be thrashed over in future reviews and reports. But such problems do not occur in a political vacuum. As the home insulation debacle demonstrated, government failure often flows from the determination of headstrong ministers to override practical difficulties. In such cases, ministers must take responsibility for the consequences of their actions and not hide behind their overstretched public servants.

Richard Mulgan is an emeritus professor at the ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy. richard.mulgan@anu.edu.au