The federal department of employment and workplace relations has investigated job services providers who demand jobseekers provide payslip information so the company can claim public money, but has so far taken no action against them.
Department officials were questioned on Monday during Senate estimates, after a Guardian Australia investigation in April revealing that many job services providers were hounding jobseekers for payslips.
However, the department admitted it had sent three general advisory notices to all job services providers in the past 18 months, including one just days after Guardian Australia’s investigation was published.
Jobseekers must sign up with a private job provider to receive Centrelink benefits, which they can continue to claim if they have work but are earning below a certain threshold.
The providers can claim “outcome payments” from the government when a client on their books has completed four, 12 and 26 weeks of employment, regardless of how the client found the job, using payslips as proof of the client’s employment. In 2022-23 providers received $329m in outcome payments.
Jobseekers are under no obligation to provide payslips to their job services provider, but testimony from jobseekers and former job agency staff detailed the extreme and targeted methods companies in Australia’s privatised employment services network were going to in order to get them.
Methods included tracking jobseekers down on Facebook, repeatedly cold-calling their employers, and threatening to put the client’s welfare payments on hold – using Centrelink’s compliance framework – and in some cases actually following through with this if they did not provide the payslips.
A department spokesperson told Guardian Australia in May that “providers must not threaten or apply payment suspensions or demerits under the Targeted Compliance Framework to compel participants to supply payslips or evidence of employment.”
On Tuesday they said: “The department can assure clients it will investigate claims and take action as appropriate.”
During estimates on Monday, Greens senator Penny Allman-Payne asked the department what it had done to stop providers harassing people for their payslips.
Quyen Tran, assistant secretary of the funds and payments branch, said that three advisory notices had been sent to job services providers in the past 18 months.
“[The notices] made very clear that providers are not to harass or bully participants into providing payslips,” Tran said. “We have also been looking at ensuring, through program assurance activities, that providers are not inappropriately applying the targeted compliance framework to participants who are not providing payslips.”
When asked, however, how many providers had been subject to compliance action, department officials said they weren’t aware of any that had been, and took the question on notice.
When told by the department’s deputy secretary Tania Rishniw that affected jobseekers should call the national complaints line if their provider was harassing them for payslips, Allman-Payne said the line currently referred jobseekers back to the provider to sort the issue out.
“There’s one rule for income support recipients, and it seems to me there’s a completely other rule for these providers – and they’re multimillion-dollar companies in most cases,” Allman-Payne said.
“Are you aware at the moment there are still job service providers that are completely disregarding the advice you’ve given them?”
Rishniw said while the department was “absolutely looking at where providers are repeatedly asking clients for their payslips and taking direct action with those providers,” she was “not aware of any at the moment”.
She reiterated that jobseekers experiencing harassment for payslips should contact the complaints line: “We will take that seriously and act on it.”
