Case #3 · Robodebt Cost of Failure: 453,000 People, One Frozen Definition

Cost of Failure #3: Robodebt - 453,000 People, One Frozen Definition

The algorithm confirmed what the agency needed to be true. AU$565 million in debts simply were never owed.

Between 2015 and 2019, the Australian government ran an automated debt recovery scheme against its own welfare recipients.

Officially it was called the Online Compliance Intervention.

Everyone else called it Robodebt.

By the time it stopped, the scheme had issued debt notices to 453,000 people,
many of them wrong, some to people who owed nothing at all.
It took a Federal Court ruling and a Royal Commission to establish what should have been obvious from the design stage,
the mechanism generating these debts was never lawful.