A great advantage of having children and grandchildren is that they can show you how to do things on the internet – or your phone – that you can’t for the life of you see how to do yourself. But a small advantage that oldies have over youngsters is that we can remember how much more clunky and inconvenient life used to be before the digital revolution.
When you had to get out of your chair to change the telly to one of the other three channels. When you spent lunchtimes walking to companies’ offices to pay bills. When you had to visit your own branch of a bank to get cash or deposit a cheque.
When you had to write and post letters, rather than dashing off an email or text message. When we were paid in notes and coins rather than via a direct credit. When buying something from a business overseas was too tricky to ever contemplate.
Computers connected by the internet are transforming our world, making many of the things we do easier, more convenient, better and often cheaper. Businesses are adopting new technology because they see it as a way to cut costs, compete more effectively, attract more customers and make more money.
Governments have been slower to take advantage of digitisation, websites, artificial intelligence and machine learning. But there’s a lot to be gained in reduced red tape, convenience for taxpayers, efficiency and cost saving, and now governments at all levels are stepping up their use of new technology – which most of us would be pleased to see.
But, as with so many things, new technology can be used for good or ill. The most egregious case of government misuse of technology was surely Centrelink’s “automated income compliance program” aka robo-debt.
Here, a dodgy algorithm was used to accuse people on benefits of understating their income over many years and to demand repayment. Despite assurances by the two ministers responsible – Christian Porter and Alan Tudge – that all was fair and above board, huge anxiety was caused to many unjustly accused poor people.
The Coalition government obfuscated for years before a court finally ruled the program unlawful and the government agreed to return $1.8 billion. For a scheme intended to cut costs, it was an immoral own goal.
But last week the NSW Ombudsman, Paul Miller, revealed that something similar had been going on in NSW. Between 2016 and 2019, the state’s debt-collection agency, Revenue NSW, unlawfully used an automated system to claw back unpaid fines from financially vulnerable people, in some cases emptying bank accounts and leaving them unable to buy food or pay rent.
The automated system created garnishee orders, requiring banks to remove money from debtors’ bank accounts, without the debtors even being informed. The computer program took no account of any hardship this would impose.
Between 2011 and 2019, the number of garnishee orders issued by Revenue NSW each year jumped from 6900 to more than 1.6 million. The Ombudsman began investigating after receiving “a spate of complaints from people, many of them financially vulnerable individuals, who had discovered their bank accounts had been stripped of funds, and sometimes completely emptied.
“Those people were not complaining to us about the use of automation. They didn’t even know about it.”
As usually happens, we find out about this long after the problem has been (apparently) rectified. Unlike the feds, the NSW Revenue office agreed to modify its process in 2019, so that garnishee orders are no longer fully automated.
People identified as vulnerable were excluded from garnishee orders. And a minimum amount of $523.10 (!) is now left in the garnished account.
But Revenue NSW didn’t seek advice on whether the original scheme was legal, so the Ombudsman did. It wasn’t. The lawyers say the law gives the right to extract money from people to an “authorised person” – not to a machine.
So, two isolated incidents – one federal, one state – and everything’s now fixed? Don’t be so sure. Miller says that, in NSW, other agencies are known to be using machine technologies for enforcement of fines, policing, child protection and driver licence suspensions.
How do we know it isn’t happening – or will happen – in other states?
NSW Finance Minister Damien Tudehope said garnishee orders were a last resort after a person had been contacted multiple times in writing and given options about overdue fines.
“For those who have chosen to ignore our notices and simply don’t want to pay, the community has an expectation we take action to recover what is owed,” he said.
Yes, but few of us want governments riding roughshod over people who can’t pay because they’re on poverty-level social security benefits.
I leave the last word to Anoulack Chanthivong, NSW opposition finance spokesman: “The pursuit of economic efficiency through artificial intelligence should never come at the expense of treating our more vulnerable citizens with dignity and decency.
“Governments at all levels are meant to serve our community and make their lives better, not find unlawful ways to make them worse.”
