It's been nearly six years, but Emma Warren still vividly remembers the moment she was told she owed the government $8,000.
"I felt like I couldn't breathe," she said.
"I was just so absolutely shocked … I'd been someone that had always been doing the right thing by the government."
Ms Warren, now 46, lives with multiple disabilities, including Crohn's disease and epilepsy, and has been receiving the Disability Support Pension since she was in her 20s.
The Newcastle resident was a researcher and tutor at the University of Newcastle until 2015, when she became too unwell to continue working.
"To be saddled with a debt of $8,000 when you're unable to work, it was just crushing," Ms Warren said.
It was around that time an automated debt recovery program known as Robodebt, which was later ruled unlawful, began.
The program was rolled out by the then-Coalition government, lobbing debt notices at hundreds of thousands of Australians such as Ms Warren.
The current federal government announced a royal commission into it this week.
To this day, Ms Warren has "visceral responses" which she says exacerbate her disabilities whenever she gets a message about her payment or comes across the words "myGov", "Centrelink" or "Robodebt".
She said she and people she knows who received Robodebt notices feel "marked".
"I really worry that there will always be an air of suspicion around people like myself that had these debts raised against them," she said.
What was Robodebt?
The Robodebt system was created when an existing process comparing Centrelink recipients' reported income to their tax record, in order to identify instances where they may had been overpaid, was automated.
But there were serious problems.
Chief among them, the automated system could not pick up on nuance as well as the previous person-led approach.
The lack of human oversight meant there were few safeguards in place to protect against any flaws in the algorithm.
Robodebt also reversed the onus of proof — those given debt notices had to prove they didn't owe the debt, rather than Centrelink having to prove it existed and that it was calculated correctly.
Between 2015 and 2019, the scheme unlawfully claimed almost $2 billion from more than 400,000 Australians. Some $750 million was wrongly recovered from 381,000 people.
Ms Warren was never told explicitly how her debt was calculated, but believes the algorithms incorrectly counted a PhD scholarship as taxable income. Scholarship payments are generally exempt from income tax.
She said her anxiety soared over the 2015 Christmas period when she was contacted by a debt collector, but couldn't get a hold of anyone at Centrelink until after the holidays.
When she did speak with a person at Centrelink, she said they told her the debt collector call should not have happened as her debt had actually been placed on hold.
"Because there weren't actually humans involved in checking and looking further, mistakes … weren't picked up," she said.
Ms Warren said her debt notice didn't include many specifics, essentially only that she owed money and had to pay it back.
She also recalls being in a Centrelink office and seeing a middle-aged man "on his knees, crying and begging to be told … where specifically his debt came from".
"I felt the same despair that person felt — what do you do when your last resort for food and rent and medicine is taken away from you?
"It's soul-crushing."
Last year, the Federal Court approved a $1.8 billion settlement between victims and the federal government, including $112 million in compensation.
While Ms Warren has regained the money she was told she had to pay back to Centrelink, she, like many other victims, is still waiting on compensation.
'The impact lasts to this day'
The Robodebt pain for Nicole Hibberd-Smith has also been long-lasting.
"My body still remembers the stress and trauma," she said.
In 2015, Ms Hibberd-Smith's husband died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her and their three young kids behind.
The Sydneysider was only able to return to work part-time, so applied for the only income support she could get at the time, the Parenting Payment. She said the payment was an inadequate amount for her and her kids.
In 2018, when she'd moved from receiving the Parenting Payment to Newstart — now known as JobSeeker — she was hit with a Robodebt of thousands of dollars. She doesn't remember the exact amount because she no longer has the original letter.
She scrambled to pay the debt back by borrowing money, fearing her Newstart would be cut off, and she'd be left unable to feed her family.
Ms Hibberd-Smith, now 50, said when this week's royal commission was announced, her kids also became stressed and "went into a spin".
"They all remember the day that I got the Robodebt letter," she said.
Leanne Ho from Economic Justice Australia, a community legal body which helped thousands of Robodebt victims, said the debacle helped create a culture of fear around Centrelink.
"People couldn't trust that they would be treated with fairness or compassion," Ms Ho said.
"The struggles that people went through to try to work out how the debt was calculated and why they had it, the impact lasts to this day."
'I want to speak up for those who can't'
The royal commission fulfils an election promise from the new Labor government, which said the full toll of the scheme was yet to be revealed, including numerous claims of suicides.
"People lost their lives," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said this week.
Scott Morrison, who was social services minister when Robodebt was established, has said his government adequately dealt with the scheme when scrapping it.
In 2020 he apologised for the "hurt or harm" caused by Robodebt but has maintained a royal commission was unnecessary.
While the income averaging used by the Robodebt scheme was key to it being eventually ruled unlawful, advocates say other automated systems are still causing issues today.
Ms Ho said before Robodebt, if a Centrelink recipient received a debt notice, they could speak to a staff member to find out more about how it was calculated.
Today, even lawyers and case workers struggle to get information about debt notices, she said.
Ms Ho would like to see more human oversight over data-matching algorithms, and more transparency for Centrelink recipients.
"[Automation] is not always a problem. It can be a legitimate tool to identify where there might be a problem that needs investigation," she said.
"But what we see now is that the automation is used without any checking and we still see cases where it goes wrong and harms people.
"This is why the royal commission is so important — not just to hold those responsible to account, but to ensure that current and future use of automation is transparent, fair and legal."
Both Ms Warren and Ms Hibberd Smith are pleased about the royal commission and plan on submitting their own evidence.
"I want to speak up for all those people that can't, [those who] are still lying under their doona, terrified every time they see a myGov notice come onto their phone," Ms Hibberd-Smith said
"I hope it shines a light on many of the systematic issues across Centrelink."
