You do know that nobody is getting around 10% these days,

of course if she doesnt die at the age of 82 then theres a problem isnt here? What do you suggest, making her into soylent green?

Government says claims are not accurate

The Department of Human Services has denied several of the claims in the email.

It said recipients were not assessed on the basis of doubled income.

"We give those who receive a request for information an opportunity to review, confirm or change these details in the online system," the department's general manager Hank Jongen said in a statement.

However, this does not deal with the key claim in the letter that recipients are often unable to identify that doubled income has been included in the calculation.

The department also said non-assessable income was not included in debt assessments.

However, 7.30 has already reported the experience of George Birkett, who had more than $7,000 in non-assessable income erroneously included in his debt assessment.

This was removed after his story was aired on the program.

The department also insists Paid Parental Leave assessments are made in accordance with the applicable legislation.

"Some of our staff believe that intensive one-on-one management of recipients is always required ... some staff do not welcome technology driven change," Mr Jongen said.

"We will continue to work with staff to explain how the system operates and the role they play."

The department published their full response to the claims on their website.

Letter claims compliance officers instructed to ignore errors

The letter also claims compliance officers have been instructed to ignore errors generated by the OCI's "fuzzy matching logic", which compares employer names reported to Centrelink with the names welfare recipients have reported to the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

The letter claims the system is duplicating recipients' estimated income when there is a mismatch between the two company names.

"The official response was that these are correct and no one is permitted to fix them," the letter said.

The letter includes what purports to be an internal memorandum to staff, justifying how similar employer names will not be picked up by the OCI system.

The memo said "in these cases the system is working". It instructs staff where they see a failure to match similar employer names not to alter the outcome. Instead they should direct the welfare recipient online, and they should not report the error to the internal OCI Helpdesk.

The letter also said:

* Age pensioners who received termination payments (which are exempt) are receiving debt assessments that wrongly include those termination payments.
* Paid Parental Leave recipients have wrongly had that income considered assessable income in their debt assessments. (7.30 understands the rules around exempt PPL changed recently and it is now assessable income.)
* Some debt notices are entirely erroneous: "Debts are being raised solely on a year or more of exempt income." And in some instances "we are recovering more money than the customer was ever paid".
* Recipients who dispute the debt notice but also tick a box indicating they accept the employer income assessed by OCI will not have that income adjusted, even when a compliance officer identifies that much of the income assessed was exempt income.
* Customers who raise disputes will only have the specific matters they dispute adjusted in their favour, even when compliance staff identify other errors in the assessment.
* If compliance staff do attempt to correct errors they identify, their "work will returned as wrong and we will have to cancel the corrections".

But the engineer who has worked to advance himself, paid shiteloads of tax and amassed a sizable nest egg gets nothing?

Firstly, the family home was probably purchased 30 plus years ago.
With interest it has cost three, four maybe five times what it was purchased for.

I will have few assets when I retire.
I have 10 years to divest myself of any savings, shares and investments.
I would rather put the money in a tin can than have Govco assess it and stop my pension.
After all, to get the amount in that I can get off the pension in interest, Id need to have much more than I currently have without gradually diminishing my financial base.

Why should I pay for loosers?
Why should I fund bludgers?
Why should I have to pay tax all my life and get nothing back, zero, nada?

I have paid more tax than many of these dickheads have ever earned, I deserve, NO demand a fair share back.

Centrelink has warned staff that leaking information may constitute a criminal offence as a Senate inquiry into its controversial debt recovery system now appears all but certain.

One Nation and the Nick Xenophon Team confirmed to Guardian Australia that they would support an inquiry, easily giving the opposition and the Greens the numbers.

The automated system has been the subject of a series of damaging leaks since mid-December, when a compliance officer told Guardian Australia that only a fraction of the debts being issued were genuine.

On Tuesday the Department of Human Services people services manager, Adrian Hudson, sent an email to staff, reminding them of the consequences of improper leaking.

The memo did not directly reference the debt recovery system but warned public servants that they would not be protected if they leaked information externally.

Hudson told workers they would only be protected if they disclosed information in accordance with the Public Interests Disclosures Act. “Disclosures made under the public interest disclosure arrangements and ‘leaking’ information are not the same thing,” he said.

“Outside of the PID Act, an employee who makes a disclosure externally will not be protected and may in fact be committing a criminal offence or be in breach of the APS Code of Conduct.”

The Community and Public Sector Union has hit back at the department, saying it was trying to keep problems with the debt recovery system secret.

Its deputy national president, Lisa Newman, described the memo as an “extraordinary broadside at DHS staff” who were working on the frontline to deal with the government’s debt collection mess.

Newman said it was “especially galling” because the controversial system was the result of decisions by senior management and the federal government.

“DHS staff work hard to help ordinary Australians and are frustrated that the agency has been run into the ground and that service standards are totally unacceptable,” she said. “Rather than work with the CPSU and our members to fix these problems, DHS management is trying to keep its many problems secret.

“Adrian Hudson could be better spending his time than monstering staff with threats. Instead, perhaps he could spend some time listening to their suggestions on how to fix this situation so that people who’ve done nothing wrong stop being sent debt notices.”

Earlier on Wednesday, the auditor general rejected a request to investigate the Centrelink system.

The Australian National Audit Office said it did not want to duplicate the work of a separate investigation into the controversial system now being conducted by the commonwealth ombudsman, but would consider the issue again next financial year.

“I have consulted with the Ombudsman regarding the scope of his own motion investigation and do not intend to commence an audit while the Ombudsman’s investigation is underway,” the auditor general, Grant Hehir, wrote to Labor’s Linda Burney on Wednesday.

“Nonetheless, I will consider the inclusion of an audit in the development of my 2017-18 Audit Work Program.”