A senior public servant was “very angry” when she was told the robodebt scheme required a “major incident response” from the Department of Human Services, a royal commission has been told.
The commission is investigating why and how the unlawful Centrelink debt recovery scheme was established in 2015 and ran until November 2019, ending in a $1.8bn settlement with hundreds of thousands of victims.
Karen Harfield, who was the general manager of customer compliance at DHS, told the royal commission on Thursday she had raised concerns about the scheme in January 2017.
Harfield said Malisa Golightly, a deputy secretary at DHS who was more senior than her, had responded angrily. Golightly has since passed away.
“She was very angry that I had suggested that it required major response, or that there was a requirement to re-evaluate the budget measures at all,” Harfield said.
“She made it very clear that as the band three in the department, it was her decision about whether something be classified as a major response and that what I needed to do was make sure that I was able to respond to what she needed me to do.”
In the May 2015 budget, the robodebt scheme was touted to deliver $1.2bn in savings after an initial pilot in July and a ramp up the following year.
The royal commission has heard some DHS staff were concerned the system was not ready to be launched at scale in mid-2016.
Harfield said the system had been “behind time and over budget”. She said the decision to eventually “switch on” the program was made by Golightly.
That ended up in massive controversy when thousands of Australians started complaining about receiving unexplained welfare debts.
Harfield said she had raised her concerns at this point but was “unable to influence Malisa” away from the “direction of deliver the numbers”.
“[Golightly] didn’t seek or value any of the sort of the reflections about the measure,” Harfield said.
Harfield was subsequently moved into another role.
Harfield faced scrutiny of her own about her response to a frontline Centrelink worker who wrote to the boss of DHS, Kathryn Campbell, in February 2017 to warn of the scheme’s problems.
Harfield was sent to meet with Centrelink employee Colleen Taylor in Brisbane after the email, which warned Campbell she was being “misled” about the way the robodebt scheme was really operating. Guardian Australia revealed Taylor’s role this month.
Taylor told the royal commission on Tuesday that Harfield had mischaracterised her complaints and “not listened”.
Harfield accepted Taylor had raised problems with the “income averaging” method central to robodebt.
The commissioner, Catherine Holmes, said Taylor had made the “obvious point” that Centrelink was using “unreliable” data to raise welfare debts.
“Did it occur to you that she was perfectly right?” Holmes asked.
Harfield replied that the legal questions were being dealt with by Golightly.
“I had raised some of the issues,” Harfield said. “I understand there’s this sense in terms of averaging …. But for me that wasn’t really the focus.”
Holmes noted Taylor had not raised legal concerns but the simple fact that the data was “corrupt”, or essentially mathematically flawed.
“These were issues that had been raised previously,” Harfield said. “The budget measure was the budget measure and it had been implemented as described in the budget measure.”
Holmes suggested that “even if [Taylor] was right, nobody was going to listen to her”.
“So if anybody pointed out the flaws in it, it didn’t matter, because that was the way it was going to work?” Holmes asked.
Harfield replied there was “certainly a focus on keeping [the program] going”. “My position wasn’t accepted. It was the focus on achieving the review numbers as described in the budget papers.”
On Wednesday, the former social services minister, Scott Morrison, blamed the public service for what he said was the “unthinkable” and “critical failure” to not tell him the robodebt scheme might be unlawful when it was established in 2015.
The royal commission continues.
