Griffin originally claimed benefits between February and May in 2013, receiving a total of $3,754 from Centrelink. 

He reported working small amounts in three fortnights within those months.

In two fortnights, he worked 24 hours and earned $618 a fortnight, and in the third he worked 15 hours and earned $386.

Griffin has provided payslips to Guardian Australia that clearly show he reported this income accurately.

He boosted his working hours in the rest of his year, while not claiming welfare, and ended up with a total income of $26,642 for the 2013-14 financial year. 

Centrelink’s online system asked him to confirm that he had earned $26,642, which Griffin did. This is where his problems began. Screenshots show how Centrelink’s system then averaged out his $26,000 yearly income across every fortnightly reporting period.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jan/03/centrelinks-debt-...

In the toon above, senator Whatisname (I use an Alan Jones euphemism to call someone with a difficult name to spell) did not really say that.... But knowing how Joe Hockey worked the system, we can guess that the silly utterance from David Whatisname excluded the politicians who to say the least get a "pension" with which one could buy a hundred gold watches EVERY YEAR...

When politicians spend taxpayers money flying themselves to fundraising parties or flying to their own weddings, we leave it up to the politician to decide if their claim is “outside of entitlement”.

When it comes to income tax we allow people to claim $300 worth of tax deductions without receipts because we think it petty to record of every minor expense. When the Australian Tax Office is in dispute with billionaires it adopts a “business like” approach, often settling for far far less than the initial estimate.

But there is no such leeway, nor respect, shown to those people the parliament has deemed worthy of welfare support. Centrelink has sent tens of thousands of letters of demand to citizens based on a computer algorithm that suggests they might have been overpaid. In the lead up to Christmas some of the most vulnerable Australians have been forced to choose between wasting days looking for six-year-old pay slips, spending days on the phone to Centrelink, which is notorious for not answering, or to succumb to enormous pressure from their own government and repay hundreds or thousands of dollars that they might not even owe. It’s obscene.

Like the economic modelling used to argue that a $50bn tax cut for big business is the best way to boost the wages of low paid workers, the data matching algorithm used by Centrelink to identify “overpayment” is only as accurate as the assumptions and data it relies on. As the old adage says: garbage in, garbage out.

As anyone who has ever tried to describe it knows, the Australian welfare system is exceedingly complex. Indeed, over the past three decades there have been repeated attempts to build computerised “expert systems” to help Centrelink staff get a clear understanding of exactly who is eligible for what. All attempts have failed. Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted on the futile effort to clearly define eligibility.

But the impossibility of accurately defining eligibility has not stopped the Turnbull government from using crude data matching to justify sending intimidating letters to large numbers of Australians, an estimated 20% of which are in error. 

When ATO data collected on one basis is “matched” to data held by Centrelink on another basis guess what you get? Lots of “inconsistencies”. It’s not evidence of overpayment, but this government is using it as enough evidence to send people threatening letters, often to out-of-date addresses, and then commencing debt collection procedures when people can’t or don’t respond.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/04/billionaires-get-m...

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