Australia's Labor government said on Thursday it will hold a wide-ranging inquiry into an automated debt recovery scheme set up by the former conservative coalition which wrongly calculated thousands of welfare recipients owed money to the government.
The Robodebt programme, which was in place between July 2015 and November 2019, was introduced to ensure welfare recipients were not under-reporting their income and over-receiving government payments. It used computer algorithms to recover money with little to no human oversight.
