Morrison to face robo-debt grilling after evidence legal advice was erased

Payne replied: “I don’t know the answer to that question, and I say that in all transparency”.

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He put two possible explanations to Payne: that either the advice had changed, or someone had simply removed it. Payne said she didn’t know. Asked whether it simply amounted to a shortcoming of bureaucratic advice, Payne replied, “that is a question I have asked myself”.

She told the hearing the briefings said the departments were continuing to work on prospective legislative changes and she expected updated advice would be brought to the relevant minister “as needed”, but that “did not come to pass”.

In a February 2, 2015 diary note, Payne wrote, “cracking down – what can we do w/o [without] having to legislate[?]”

Payne told the commission that note reflected the Senate numbers, which involved a powerful crossbench “and the legislative environment at that time”.

While giving evidence, Payne said her “initial sense” is that she would have reviewed the final proposal that went to the expenditure review committee, which she attended in early 2015, but she could find no records confirming that.

Asked by commissioner Catherine Holmes whether it would be extraordinary if she hadn’t reviewed it, Payne said there were some 30 budget measures that went through her department.

Morrison will front the commission on Wednesday.

The royal commission later heard from a public servant employed to check Centrelink recipients’ debts under the robo-debt scheme.

Colleen Taylor wrote to DHS secretary Kathryn Campbell in January 2017 following an all-staff email assuring workers there was no change to the way the department was calculating debts. Taylor told Campbell there had been a “dramatic change” between the previous manual assessment of payment and income discrepancies, and the new system that relied heavily on income averaging.

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Taylor said she told superiors “you just can’t do this to people” over the flawed debt calculation method she said effectively double-counted income.

She told the hearing one of her colleagues quit over the scheme while others discussed how they could stop it.

“There was a lot of discussion of just how unfair it was, and sympathy for the information that was out there in the media,” Taylor told the commission.

She said there were several examples of alleged debts where there was no real discrepancy, but one raised by the duplication of employers due to typographical errors in the records.

“I argued the point and they said, ‘well, if you don’t like it, you can just go’,” she said.

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