a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal
Curated from robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au →
Australia's Robodebt raised welfare debts by taking a person's annual income from the tax office, dividing it evenly across the year, and treating the result as what they had earned in each fortnight. For anyone with irregular work, which is most people claiming, that produces a debt that was never owed, and the burden of disproving it fell on the recipient. Around 470,000 debts were raised and later wiped, with a settlement of 1.8 billion Australian dollars. Commissioner Catherine Holmes reported in July 2023 across three volumes and 57 recommendations, finding the scheme had been devised without regard to social security law and that the averaging was not an unfortunate side effect but the design. Filed here because it is the case that answers the question of whether a rule-based automated decision counts: the Dutch and Australian systems did the most damage on this page and neither one used a model.
