A government-run IT system responsible for hundreds of unlawful cancellations of welfare payments will be offline for several months.
The Targeted Compliance Framework runs Australia's controversial mutual obligations regime for welfare recipients.
The system has been paused since 2025, after it unlawfully cancelled the payments of 964 job seekers between April 2022 and July 2024, the Commonwealth Ombudsman found.
Laws introduced after the Robodebt scandal require agencies to consider each job seeker's circumstance before cutting off payments, but that did not happen.
Many recipients then had to go to great lengths, including producing detailed historical documents, to retrieve funds.
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations secretary Simon Duggan told a Senate committee that an extended period was needed to fix the system.
