‘You are being misled’: the Centrelink worker who tried to stop robodebt as it started

It was nearly 2pm on 7 February 2017 when Centrelink frontline worker Colleen Taylor sent off an email that may yet occupy a small place in Australian political history.

Among about 3,000 words of jargon and painstaking detail about Centrelink processes was a statement of moral clarity. “As a compliance unit,” Taylor wrote, “we should not be the ones stealing from our customers.”

The subject of Taylor’s email was what had just been dubbed “robodebt”. Now the subject of a royal commission, the disastrous program was launched by the then social services minister Scott Morrison in 2015 but only unleashed at scale towards the end of 2016. It then hit the headlines.

Taylor’s email, courageously sent to the most senior person in a department of more than 30,000 staff members – Kathryn Campbell – was released among a tranche of hundreds of documents by a royal commission this week.

Guardian Australia spoke to Taylor in Queensland this week.

She was shocked and initially unnerved to learn her emails and name had been published by the royal commission.

Talking about the period brought back traumatic memories. Taylor insisted modestly she was not a “whistleblower”, saying she always kept her concerns “in house” and had cleared the correspondence with her direct superiors.

Taylor also says she is not a victim. “Our poor customers, they’re the ones that suffered,” she says.

By early 2017, Coalition government ministers were resolutely defending the robodebt scheme. One had previously threatened jail for those said to be overpaid benefits. Guardian Australia had been reporting on claims from unnamed Centrelink staff members and welfare recipients that thousands of people were being wrongly issued welfare debts. Influential activists including Asher Wolf and Lyndsey Jackson created the effective #notmydebt online campaign.

But the Department of Human Services (DHS, now known as Services Australia) which ran Centrelink, claimed the reporting was inaccurate and, as Campbell later said, the media had drummed up the story during a quiet summer for news. At one stage, it even released the personal information of a welfare recipient who had written an opinion piece criticising the scheme.

After the Community and Public Sector Union obtained and released an email from a Centrelink staff whistleblower (not Taylor) outlining concerns about the program in January 2017, Campbell issued an all-staff email.

“It is important to me to address some recent incorrect reporting with you directly,” she said in the 25 January 2017 missive. “How we match records with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is not a new process —we have been doing it successfully for many years. There have also been no changes to how we assess income or calculate and recover debt.”

As a frontline staff member who had worked in Centrelink compliance for nearly six years, Taylor had become increasingly outraged by the new ways she and her colleagues were being asked to calculate alleged welfare debts. She had already shot off an initial – also lengthy – email outlining her concerns to managers in January 2016.

She knew Campbell’s claims were wrong. Things had changed. Her email to Campbell is a prescient, devastating take-down of the program.

Taylor was “a loyal employee of many years standing who has only ever raised concerns in-house”. She wanted to “respond to you directly as your statement tells me that you are being misled and I want to ensure my words reach you”.

It is easy to understand why Taylor thought her message might not cut through. Taylor was an APS4-level employee, one of 17,000 of those in a department of about 32,000 staff members. Campbell was the top boss and, according to some who have given evidence at the royal commission, an intimidating figure. Campbell has not yet been asked by the royal commission to respond to these claims but returns to the stand next week.

Once you demonise people, you can get away with a lot of things

Colleen Taylor

Directly contradicting her boss, Taylor wrote: “There has been a very dramatic change within the last 18 months to the way in which compliance assesses income and calculates and recovers debt. I was involved in both the old and new processes and can provide a first-hand explanation to you.”

Taylor identified several key issues, including the use of “income averaging” – the central plank of the robodebt scheme – which was subsequently found to be unlawful by a court, leading to a $1.8bn settlement. Taylor explained that staff had previously used ATO data (annual pay statements) as a guide to see if someone may have underreported their fortnightly income to Centrelink. Then they would seek information from the person’s employer so they could properly investigate the case.

“It was not so much thinking, ‘Can they legally do that?’” Taylor says now. “It was thinking, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’”

What disturbed her was that – legal or not – the debts were not accurate. “We also knew that many customers would assume that Centrelink had all the information and that it must be right,” Taylor says.

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Darren O’Donovan, an administrative law lecturer at LaTrobe University and one of the nation’s top robodebt experts, says Taylor’s account was a “clear-eyed take down of the miscalculations that drove robodebt”.

“The ways payroll records were deficient or impossible to obtain are named, one by one,” he said. “It spells out how crude averaging of an annual figure simply could not reflect the lived reality of casualised work, particularly for young people.

Documents published by the royal commission show that within four minutes, Campbell asked for immediate analysis of Taylor’s concerns. Campbell also suspected, incorrectly, that Taylor would have sent the email to the union.

The following day, DHS senior managers held a teleconference with Taylor. The following week, one flew to Brisbane to meet with her personally. Taylor still has her notes of those meetings, in which she did her best to get her message across.

If these events suggest the department was taking her concerns seriously, a close reading of the documents indicates otherwise.

In a briefing to Campbell, DHS officials are dismissive. They suggest “it was clear” Taylor didn’t understand they “capabilities” of the system. They also portray her as overly sympathetic to welfare recipients, saying she “identified strongly with customers and expressed that customers should be given the benefit of the doubt”.

Ten days later, Campbell’s deputy, Malisa Golightly, wrote to Taylor saying her “suggestions are being considered and will be taken into account in our continuous improvement processes”.

After that, “not a lot happened, to be honest,” Taylor says.

O’Donovan says: “Internal voices of reason were silenced by a stubborn refusal to confront mistakes and the pursuit of budgetary targets”.

Melissa Donnelly, national secretary of the CPSU, says: “From the outset, the CPSU and frontline staff in Services Australia were raising alarm bells about the Robodebt scheme; unfortunately, the concerns of frontline expert workers were persistently ignored.”

Taylor says she is one of many Centrelink officials who she believed had raised concerns. “I did say, ‘This is the sort of thing that ends up in a royal commission,’” she says. “I also said, ‘People will commit suicide.’ And it absolutely devastates me that that’s what happened. The feeling of hopelessness up against the bureaucracy would be overwhelming.”

Taylor is yet to be contacted by the royal commission.

“Once you demonise people, you can get away with a lot of things,” Taylor says now.

“We went from this thing that 95% [of welfare recipients] are doing the right thing, to, almost 95% are ripping us off because of this data-matching.

“We were compliance officers and we were the ones stealing from our customers. How crazy was that? It’s just unbelievable.”

The royal commission continues.