Dear Department of Human Services,

Please treat this as a formal request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act 1982.

I request the following information relating to the new Online Compliance Intervention programme, the initiative to match Centrelink data with data from the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to detect potential overpayment and the recovery of those overpayments from citizens, referred to in the media as "robodebt".

1. Documents, such as reports to management on the progress of the OCI programme, that provide a summary of the number of letters sent to payment recipients asking for more information ("Discrepancy Letters") and the value of potential debt identified in those letters.
2. Documents, such as reports to management on the progress of the OCI programme, that provide a summary of the number of debts raised against payment recipients and their value, both as a total and average.
3. Documents, such as reports to management on the progress of the OCI programme, that contain a breakdown of the number and value of debts in the following categories, each a subset of the total debts raised at that date:
a) Number of debts where the debt amount is determined to be exactly the same as when originally raised after response from the customer,
b) Number of debts where the debt amount is determined to be higher than originally raised after response from the customer, and the total or average amount of value adjustment required,
c) Number of debts where the debt amount is determined to be lower than originally raised after response from the customer, and the total or average amount of value adjustment required,
d) Number of debts where the debt amount is determined to be zero after response from the customer, and the total or average amount of debt adjustment required,
For each category, the following summary totals should be provided at a minimum:
i) number of debts in the category
ii) total value of debts in the category
iii) amount of adjustment in debt amount required compared to the original debt amount identified.
The summary totals should also be provided for the entire set of records, so that the category amounts can be compared to the total amounts.

I expect that such summary reports would be provided to management on at least a monthly basis, if not more frequently.

Yours faithfully,

Justin Warren

Dear FOI.LEGAL.TEAM,

I only require documents from 1 June 2016 to the date of my initial request, inclusive.

I only require the latest document provided in each calendar week of this time period that contains the summary information I have requested. Where multiple documents exist that contain the same information, I only require the latest document as at 11:59pm on the Friday of that week.

If the information can be produced as a report from a database system (as per section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 1988) that report will satisfy this request for information. e.g.: A summary report showing each statistic as at 11:59pm on the Friday of each calendar week from 1 June 2016 to the date of my initial request.

Yours sincerely,

Justin Warren

Dear Department of Human Services,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Department of Human Services's handling of my FOI request 'Online Compliance Debt Amount Summaries'.

The Minister for Human Services, Alan Tudge MP, has provided multiple media statements about the amount of debt identified by the Online Compliance program, as well as general statistics about the program such as the number of people who are sent what have been variously described as 'discrepancy' letters or 'initiation' letters. One assumes that he is not simply making up these numbers or pulling them from a fundamental orifice.

It therefore beggars belief that the Department has no documents containing any of the information I have requested, particularly when it first refused my request on the grounds that there were too many documents, only to then discover that there are no documents when I attempt to narrow my request to something more tractable.

The Department appears to be deliberately frustrating FOI requests by making it impossible to guess at the particular magical incantation/description of documents that would result in any information being released whatsoever. On multiple occasions I have attempted to contact the FOI group by means other than email in order to discuss the matter constructively, but have been steadfastly avoided on all occasions.

A cynical person might suggest that this behaviour is designed to deliberately avoid any external scrutiny of the Department whatsoever.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/o...

Yours faithfully,

Justin Warren