The Senate has ordered Employment minister Amanda Rishworth hand over a review of backend technology at her department after a series of bugs and administration failures raised serious doubts about the welfare compliance system.
The Deloitte review reportedly cost $435,000 and makes recommendations about dismantling the system, known as the Targeted Compliance Framework, and could also lay bare even more faults with the technology operationalising it.
On Wednesday, InnovationAus.com revealed Deloitte’s review quickly found the backend technology at the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) is “not meeting benchmarks of other similar IT systems”.
These systems will experience “ongoing and increasing problems unless a new approach is undertaken”, a summary of the Deloitte advice from late February says.
DEWR has already had to rectify three programming errors in the system and repay jobseekers more than $1.2 million because their support payments were incorrectly reduced.
The department’s failure to apply changes to social security law has separately led to more incorrect penalties and forced a series of pauses on payment cancellations which remains in place.
The saga has put the department and the targeted compliance framework (TCF) introduced by the Coalition in 2018 under intense scrutiny, including a Commonwealth Ombudsman investigation.
Deloitte was procured at the start of the year to provide an assurance review of the TCF, including the IT systems that operationalise it.
That review is believed to be complete and over the weekend The Saturday Paper reported it contains recommendations to dismantle the TCF.
In the Senate on Wednesday, Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne successfully moved an order for the production of the Deloitte report, its assurance statement and correspondence between the consultancy, the department and the minister about the process.
The Senate agreed to the motion and the minister now has until August 5 to produce the documents.
Government’s can refuse the orders on public interest grounds, and the Albanese government has made public interest immunity claims at three times the frequency of the Morrison government.
The Albanese government is also dealing with more requests than its predecessor but integrity experts last week argued the high refusal rate shows the transparency mechanism is being abused and must be reformed.
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