Displaying items by tag: Centrelink

GUEST OPINION: "The Report into Robodebt has shown that problems arose as a direct result of human decision making. The Report clearly states that there was no AI involved, just ordinary human decision-making applied at scale. Automated application of human decisions magnifies their impact, but they remain human decisions", Adelaide-based Centre for Augmented Reasoning director Professor Anton van den Hengel said today.

The Federal Government has accused telco Singtel Optus of dragging its feet on providing full details of users whose data was compromised in a data breach which the telco reported on 22 September.

Software vendor Software AG has made several senior executive appointments in Asia Pacific and Japan.

Until yesterday, I was wondering why the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a honest Christian man who goes to church every Sunday, was not letting fly at the men who had tried to reclaim money from the poor and starving in this country and ended up with a bill of $1.2 billion in legal fees.

It's beginning to look like the Federal Government should avoid anything to do with technology following the revelation on Thursday that $70 million of taxpayers' money was spent on the COVIDSafe app – and only 17 cases were detected through its use.

The first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic saw Australian telco call centres affected by global lockdowns leading to consumers being unable to contact their provider to report their phone or Internet complaints, according to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO).

Digital rights organisation Electronic Frontiers Australia has called for a detailed examination of the robodebt fiasco so that there would be an understanding of how so many people were incorrectly asked to repay money to the government.

The Coalition Government's plan to pay Australians to make up for the money they have lost due to either losing their jobs or the fact that their employers have no funds to pay them appears to be a curiously long-winded exercise, which may end up being of little use.

All technology-savvy individuals in this great country need to cut Stuart Robert some slack. The Government Services Minister was perfectly correct when he described the inability of the Centrelink site to hold up under the traffic it was experiencing as being due to a distributed denial of service attack.

Indian outsourcing firm Infosys has beaten out Accenture and IBM to win a contract with the Australian Government's Services Australia department - formerly the Department of Human Services - to rebuild the engine that calculates the welfare amount to be paid to recipients.

The Australian Greens have called on the Federal Government to immediately halt the recovery of money claimed to be owed to Centrelink and calculated through the use of data, after the Department of Human Services wiped a $4000 debt that was at the heart of a Federal Court challenge to the recovery scheme.

Vulnerable people and those suffering extreme hardship can get immediate access to emergency welfare payments through Centrelink, after the agency moved to the new payments platform developed by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

One of Australia’s largest debt collection firms, ACM Group, has been slammed in the Federal Court for its harassment and coercion in pursuing debts from consumers who had defaulted on their Telstra phone bills.

One-third of the appeals made by those who were slugged with debts by Centrelink, over what has come to be known as the Federal Government's robo-debt scheme, have been upheld by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Activist group GetUp has called on the Australian Government to adopt all recommendations put forward by the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs which released its report into the Centrelink Automated Debt Recovery programme.

The Department of Human Services has claimed that part of the reason 42 million calls to Centrelink went unanswered in the period from June 2016 to April 2017 could be due to a cyber attack.

Few Australians have faith that governments at any level can use technology competently to deliver services to the people, a study claims.

Officials from the Australian Taxation Office are unhappy about the fact that their employer is being linked to Centrelink over the automated debt recovery programme launched by the latter in December.

The Turnbull government has shown that it will stop at nothing to prevent criticism of its functioning, with the office of one of its ministers, Alan Tudge, leaking information against a woman who wrote about the Centrelink debt notice stuff-up in a newspaper.

The activist group GetUp claims Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government is shaking down ordinary people, often for debts they neither owe nor can effectively challenge.