Centrelink decisions still overturned despite damning reports

By CHARLOTTE KING

The success rate of appeals against Centrelink to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal (SSAT) has not dropped despite measures to improve customers’ understanding of decisions, Centrelink’s latest annual report has shown.

The SSAT, an independent review tribunal, received 9849 applications regarding Centrelink decisions in 2010-11, down nearly 17% from 2009-10. However, nearly one-third of original decisions were changed, a drop of only 0.2% from the previous financial year.

This is despite Centrelink putting a new policy in place in November 2010 wherein review officers telephone customers about unfavourable decisions.

“This [telephoning] initiative may have contributed to a decline in appeal requests made to external tribunals,” said Hank Jongen, the general manager of the Department of Human Services, which Centrelink was integrated into last July.

But a spokesperson from the Welfare Rights Centre Sydney, a part of the National Welfare Rights Network, which provides legal advice to Centrelink clients making appeals, says poor Centrelink practices mean many people are still appealing decisions based solely on a lack of information.

“The system is really poorly underfunded, and the quality of Centrelink decisions is often quite poor,” the spokesperson said, speaking on a condition of anonymity.

“People think they get a poor deal and it’s often only when they go to the SSAT that they get a clear explanation as to why a decision was made,” the spokesperson said. “That should happen a lot earlier but it doesn’t.”

This could explain why the number of appeals that were successful was essentially unchanged, proportionally, from when the initiative was not in place.

Centrelink is also being blasted for providing poor customer service when it comes to appeals and reviews. The Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services, Kevin Andrews, attacked Centrelink over this in a media release last December.

“Centrelink is spiralling out of control,” said Mr Andrews in the media release. “We’ve had damning reports from both the ANAO [Australian National Audit Office] and Commonwealth Ombudsman exposing deficiencies in Centrelink’s review and appeals processes.”

An investigation into Centrelink’s internal review model by the Commonwealth Ombudsman in March 2011 found that out of 100 appeals, 47 would be changed within the internal review process alone.

The report found that Centrelink had “systemic weaknesses” in letting some reviews stall indefinitely and in not uniformly considering the complexity of each case and the vulnerabilities of many of its clients.

The welfare rights spokesperson agreed that Centrelink, whilst being “good at processing things”, has problems in being discretionary in its decision-making.

“They have difficulty sometimes in engaging clients and getting all the information and clients don’t know what they need to tell Centrelink,” the spokesperson said. “Centrelink [is] increasingly becoming the ‘cop on the block’ rather than a group which is there to help people get what they’re legally entitled to.”

This is not the only issue currently plaguing Centrelink, which had 7.1 million customers and more than 25 000 employees in 2010-11.

An audit by the ANAO in October 2010 found that Centrelink was providing irrelevant material to the SSAT in appeals and often leaving out key documents, generating additional work for the tribunal.

Yet the reduction in appeals, coupled with “general operational changes”, led to a reduction in staffing at the SSAT of 7% in 2010-11, with an unspecified amount of further reductions taking place since September last year.

A task card compliance audit completed last August revealed that Centrelink had become slightly more compliant in supplying the SSAT with “satisfactory documentation”, with a compliance rate of 69% compared to only 57% compliance in 2009.

A spokesperson for the SSAT declined to speculate on the reason for the drop in appeals from Centrelink and on Centrelink’s current compliance rates.