Jenny* opened her MyGov account this week to find a message saying that as she hadn't paid her debt to Centrelink, she would soon be charged interest.
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Until that moment, she didn't realise she had an $1800 debt to the welfare agency for a period of five months across 2014-15.
Stressed, Jenny then found a message from months earlier asking her to explain her earnings from that period. She hadn't seen the notification and doesn't look at MyGov regularly. Because she hadn't explained her earnings in the time-frame, a debt had automatically been raised.
She was terrified she would soon have to cough up $1800, a lot of money for someone working at a junior level in the public service. After calling the welfare agency, Jenny was told to get her bank statements for the period and submit them within 24 hours. Her case had been in the system so long it was on the verge of going to debt collectors.
Now she must play the waiting game, to see if her debt is reduced or waived because as far as her bank statements show, when she got paid more at work during that time, her Youth Allowance payments went down.
"I can't find any proof of my previous payments [in MyGov], the only proof I have is my bank statements," Jenny said.
"I just want proof of why I have this debt."
At first, Jenny thought she was alone in this experience, before learning she was one of more than half a million people to have a Centrelink debt raised against them through the online compliance intervention system - commonly referred to as "robodebt".
"Now I know about this scheme I feel so much better," Jenny said, comforted that she wasn't the only one.
"I don't understand how they can get away with this."
There has been challenges against the system since it began in 2016 - first with activists online through the NotMyDebt website, reports in the media, a Senate inquiry, a Commonwealth Ombudsman report, pressure from Greens senator Rachel Siewert and Labor senators through Senate estimates, hundreds of cases in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and two test cases in the Federal Court still ongoing.
Now it is heading for the courts again, as Peter Gordon from Gordon Legal this week stood alongside Labor's government services spokesman Bill Shorten and announced a class action against the government for the debt collection system.
The system, which has been automated since 2016, uses a formula where a person's earnings as declared to Centrelink each fortnight, are compared to the annual earnings submitted to the tax office. An algorithm averages the earnings across the 26 fortnights in a year, and if it believes a person if overpaid, they receive a "please explain" letter. If they don't respond, a debt is raised, and in the first year almost one in two cases were sent to a debt collector.
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Former Administrative Appeals Tribunal member Terry Carney believes the system is as accurate as averaging rainfall across each month of the year and saying March was as wet as October.
"It's almost third or fourth grade arithmetic that an average doesn't speak to its component parts, everybody knew that," Professor Carney said. Not only is it inaccurate, but also unlawful and "the most immoral and unacceptable action by a government in my lifetime, and I've been around the traps now for a few years".
Professor Carney has already published a paper on the system of raising and recovering debts through this process, and said the upcoming class action would resolve the question of whether it was lawful to raise debts based on an algorithm.
About 300 cases have already been heard at the first level of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, where Professor Carney says the government has "lost in straight sets," but at that level of the tribunal decisions are not published and can't be used as precedents. Despite losing or settling those cases, the government hasn't appealed them to the second level of the tribunal, where decisions would be made public.
"If Centrelink really believed it had a legal basis for continuing to raise debts on that algorithm, on the basis of that average income extrapolated from tax records, then they could have and should have appealed against those adverse rulings against them by going to the next level of the tribunal," Professor Carney said.
"So the question is why haven't they done that, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to guess they haven't done it because if they did so they'd be likely to lose and then rather than being behind closed doors, it would be public."
Like Professor Carney, Peter Gordon, who is leading the class action, is shocked about the damage the system causes for people who are already vulnerable and less likely to challenge a government agency.
More than 2000 people applied to be part of the case in the 48 hours after it was announced.
"We've seen a pretty broad range of pretty significant cases with pretty significant consequences across the board herem," Mr Gordon said.
"There have been people who have thought about self-harm and in a couple of cases enacted self-harm and we've seen people who have been threatened with the debt being reported to their sometimes new employers, we've had people being threatened they wouldn't be able to go on overseas trips because the government would issue a departure prohibition order."
Mr Gordon said the case rested on the idea of unjust enrichment. In layman's terms "Unjust enrichment is when a party, in this case the government, makes an unlawful demand for payment, and payment is received unlawfully".
He believes the onus of proof of a debt should rest with the party raising the debt, in this case the government, instead of the welfare recipient.
"I've been increasingly shocked by the damage that's been done by the government's application of this program, to a lot of people in the community," he said.
Mr Gordon said he had a "newly rediscovered" admiration for the lawyers at community legal centres and legal aid commissions who had been fighting for individuals over the last three years, but that now was time for a collective response.
Big money is involved here - both for the individuals facing debts, and for the government, which has raised $1.25 billion in debts already and expects to raise even more.
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Allegations have also been made that external contractors, now responsible for raising debts, have been performance-managed for not finalising cases quickly enough. The department says this is untrue.
While adjustments have been made to the system in the three years it has been running, including reducing the number of cases sent to debt collectors, using registered post to ensure someone has seen a letter, changing the wording on letters sent to recipients, the government has stood by the system as a whole.
Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert labelled the class action "a political stunt" and has assured people who believe they have an incorrect debt to contact the department, to produce documentation, to argue their case.
Advocates have argued this ignores the difficulties faced in dealing with the agency, which leaves millions of calls to go unanswered each year.
Mr Robert said of the 850,000 people who had been asked to explain discrepancies in their earnings, 20 per cent had been adequately explained and of the remainder only 0.8 per cent had been overturned on appeal - a sign the program was working, he said on Tuesday.
He also said he was confident in the legality of the system.
"The government has not received anything to say the process ... we haven't received any comment from the department to say anything otherwise than what we are doing is legal."
Mr Gordon is also confident in the prospects of the class action.
"If we are required to litigate the merits of each and every case then I am very very confident there are hundreds if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of cases that will be successful.
"But there's an anterior question this case will need to grapple with, which is before you get down to individual merits, was this action of demanding and forcing payment of money from people legal?"
*Not her real name.
Do you know more? Email: sally.whyte@canberratimes.com.au