A Commonwealth Ombudsman’s report, released this morning, has confirmed that the automated system used by Department of Education and Workplace Relations (DEWR) to penalise jobseekers has unlawfully cancelled payments. The Ombudsman stated: “The Targeted Compliance Framework [TCF] has had a number of different problems, and so the secretary of DEWR needs to do much more than simply look at the cancellation issue.” It is clear that the TCF has been an egregious failure. Economic Justice Australia (EJA) is calling for an immediate commitment from Government to put a stop to payment penalties, including suspensions, reductions and cancellations, related to compulsory activities.
The Ombudsman’s report is the most recent of many reports that have highlighted issues of unlawful decisions and defective administration by DEWR.
“We now have zero confidence in the IT systems used by the Department. At the other end of these systems are hundreds of thousands of human lives, and instead of supporting these people – as it is the role of the social security system to do – these systems are instead wreaking havoc on people’s ability to meet day-to-day expenses and to live with dignity,” says Kate Allingham, CEO of EJA.
“There have been successive, and hugely consequential, failures of these IT systems. It is horrific in itself that this has ceased being news to us. The Ombudsman’s report is a forensic indictment of the TCF, but it is clear the issues go beyond the scope of what he was engaged to look into. And what this means in real life is that many thousands of people have had their payments paused, cancelled or reduced, then reinstated, sometimes in a repeating loop, and through no fault of their own.
“For someone trying to survive on below poverty-level payments, this cycle of financial uncertainty is devastating. And all because a Government Department has decided to wait for report after report after report telling them the same thing – that their system is broken. Immediate action needs to be taken.”
The TCF is a labyrinthine set of rules that enforces an already complex set of mutual obligations applied to jobseekers; a system which has been discredited for failing to genuinely support people in finding work, and which instead inflicts incredible psychological harm by stripping jobseekers of their autonomy and dignity. As a Parliamentary inquiry found in 2023: “The nature and extent of mutual obligations is like using a nuclear bomb to kill a mosquito.”
Because of bugs within the IT systems used to enforce mutual obligations, DEWR has been forced to repay more than $1.2 million to 1280 people since 2018.
A separate issue later revealed DEWR had not operationalised key 2022 legislative amendments, leading to almost 1000 incorrect payment cancellations.
Around 600 of these people have been remediated but others have been asked to provide evidence of their circumstances.
Concurrent to the Ombudsman’s report, Deloitte was separately engaged to review the TCF, as the result of pressure being applied to the Department. Although the Department has now had this report for months, they have not yet released it publicly. However, in documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws, it has been revealed that summary findings from the report show the TCF is “not meeting benchmarks of other similar IT systems” and will experience “ongoing and increasing problems unless a new approach is undertaken”.
“Enough is enough,” says Ms Allingham. “What we really don’t need is another talk-fest about issues that are, at this point, self-evident. It has been clear for quite some time that not only is the ideology underpinning these social security mechanisms in dire need of an ethics check, but that the systems being used to enforce this cruelty are defective. And while the Department continues to spend enormous amounts of money on these reviews, which continue to feed the same news back to them, people continue to be harmed.
“We need the Government to stop spending money and energy putting Band-Aids over systemic failures, and to face up to the genuine reform that is required immediately.”
EJA is calling on the Government to:
- Immediately stop all Centrelink payment penalties, including suspensions, reductions and cancellations, related to compulsory activities.
- Commit to permanently removing the Targeted Compliance Framework.
- Put an end to reviews and commit today to meaningful reform.
[ENDS]
Media contact: Kirsty Sier | 0435 075 085 | kirsty@ejaustralia.org.au
Related reading:
- ‘Automation in the Targeted Compliance Framework: when the law is changed but the system isn’t‘ — Commonwealth Ombudsman, August 2025