Backlogged in bureaucracy

How do a million Centrelink claims go unprocessed?

This week, the new CEO of Services Australia, David Hazelhurst, announced an ambitious queue-busting target for Australia’s social security system. Some were shocked by the headline figure he provided: the agency currently has over a million backlogged claims. The figures, however, are of no surprise to those trapped listening to hold music or waiting for claims to update online. But just how did Australia’s social security system get here?

A lack of accountability

The queue is, firstly, a product of a lack of transparency and effective accountability mechanisms. Six months ago, the Australian National Audit Office delivered a damning assessment of the timeliness and accuracy of welfare payments. It found the monitoring of payment timeliness was “not robust,” with reporting “biased” and only “partly reliable and verifiable.” Most concerning was the fundamental lack of ambition and missed opportunities:

Since the late 1990s, when Centrelink was established, payment timeliness performance measures have remained the same or become longer, in the context of changes to welfare claim processing that should have made it easier to meet targets.

Even the welcome arrival of 3,000 new Centrelink staff is being framed in terms of returning Services Australia to compliance with the key performance indicators (KPIs) it aimed for in the 1990s. As I discussed in a previous Welfare Law in Australia post, the Audit Office presented a compelling case that levels of error in decisions has not decreased since 2007. There are few institutions in Australian life subject to such low expectations.

The Audit Office report found evidence of “parking” in the system. Parking involves claims that are complex, or require human judgment about situations of vulnerability, being set to one side for efficiency. This “off-ramping” was effectively facilitated by the design of Service Australia’s internal KPIs. These tend to focus only on the “majority of claims.” Because bosses aim for “80% of aged pension claims to be processed in 49 days,” once a claim reaches 50 days old, there is no incentive to process it. In fact, there is an incentive to set it aside and process newer claims. The system is judged on average processing times, and often vulnerable people or complex situations go unmarked.

Masking, not treating, causes

Efforts to hold governments accountable for Services Australia’s resourcing and performance are often frustrated by the peculiar semantics of “Centrelink English.” The agency has a tendency to shift the goalposts in its reporting. In 2020, for instance, it changed its KPI measurements from the date the person first enquires about the payment to the point at which the claim is “ready for processing.” The administrative burden of submitting a “valid” application, one that covers all the complexities of social security law, was viewed as lying primarily on the individual. The Audit Office called for both Services Australia and the Department of Social Services to move beyond such practices and address the “lack of strategic consideration of underlying causal factors.”

One key part of addressing the causes of invalid applications would be to actively support customers who feel confused by — or who may make errors in — the online environment. Some 69.7 per cent of welfare payment management tasks are now self-managed digitally by recipients. The queue is the product of an organisational shift from well-resourced, in-person engagement with people’s confusion, vulnerability or life situations, towards a reactive, online self-service “payments platform.” Despite investments in technology, core Services Australia systems remain hobbled by legacy technology, some of it dating back thirty or forty years. The agency continues to focus on individual transactions rather than the person, resulting in recipients’ struggling to have their vulnerabilities recorded or having to make repeated efforts to get submitted evidence on file.

The onboarding of 3,000 new staff can provide the bandwidth to redesign a service model that supplements the online environment with in-person support. New innovations like Community Partnership Specialist Officers may offer the seeds of a more connected and responsive system, one that is anchored in community.

Wading through Crises

Services Australia has been through extraordinary times in the past decade—from the landmark scandal of robodebt to the global pandemic. It is also on the frontline of the climate crisis as it scrambles to serve communities cycling through more frequent natural disasters. Laudable measures such as large-scale debt pauses and reviews have contributed, however, to blowouts in appeals timelines.

The agency remains unable to simply focus on the present or work towards a better future. It continually has to confront and resolve past failures. A key barrier facing this week’s announcement is a potential workflow crisis presented by unlawful income apportionment cases. For unknown decades up until late 2021, the agency unlawfully calculated payment rates. Sampling has now apparently revealed that fixing these files one by one is impracticable; yet every individual affected has a right to appeal. The government has not yet decided whether it will proactively quash some or all of these unlawful debts. It will be a key test of whether the Robodebt Royal Commission has generated a more mature political environment.

The buried politics of all it

Ultimately, the backlog is a challenge for all of us to put pressure on our public representatives. Stories about bureaucratic systems are inherently difficult to communicate. Media coverage of social security often shrinks down to a tragic personal case study, which is performatively resolved by the Minister of the day. Too often we never arrive at the key challenge: “How many other people are in the same situation and what is being done for them?” The political hand is clouded by statistics and opaque language like “efficiency dividends.”

Yet they are political choices — not dull, technical ones — that lead people to make desperate phone calls on Friday night to see if “there’s any movement on my claim” before the weekend arrives. Delays mean that disability support pensioners’ claims often stall until advocates can give that vital bit of advice about an extra bit of evidence. Across the decade, budget papers have capped numbers of staff and then declared that the savings obtained from these recruitment decisions will help “fund other priorities” in other portfolios. But a queue of a million backlogged claims embodies the need for a broad community response — not just to scandals like robodebt, but to everyday struggles.