The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme was established by Letters Patent on 18 August 2022 under the Royal Commissions Act 1902 (Cth) to inquire into the Robodebt Scheme (the Scheme), and Catherine Holmes AC SC was appointed Royal Commissioner.

The Scheme was a proposal developed by the Department of Human Services (DHS), put forward as a budget measure by the Minister for Social Services in 2015 and begun that year (initially in pilot form and expanded in subsequent budgets). It was designed to recover supposed overpayments from welfare recipients going back to the financial year 2010-11 and relied heavily on a process known as 'income averaging' to assess income and entitlement to benefit. As used, it neither produced accurate results nor complied with the income calculation provisions of the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth).

By the end of 2016, the scheme was the subject of heavy public criticism, but was nonetheless persisted with until November 2019, when it was announced that debts would no longer be raised solely on the basis of averaged income. That was followed in 2020 by the settlement of a class action and a decision to reduce all debts raised in whole or part through averaging to zero.

The matters into which the Commission was directed to inquire were (in summary): how, by whom and why the scheme was established, designed, implemented; how risks and concerns in relation to it were dealt with and how complaints and challenges were managed by the government; the use of third-party debt collectors; and the effects of the scheme – human and economic.

Report structure:

The first section begins with an overview of the Scheme and summarises the Commissioner's conclusions about it. The bases for those conclusions are set out in subsequent chapters, the first of which gives some background to the departments and agencies involved in the Scheme’s introduction and administration and the processes for data matching and income averaging which were integral to it.

The second part of the report begins with the design of the Scheme and its adoption by Cabinet as a Budget measure, with a particular exploration of how concerns about its legality were put to one side. The following chapters chart the life of the Scheme, over the period between April 2015, when a pilot was commenced, and November 2019, when averaging (as the sole basis of raising debts) was abandoned. They contain extensive detail and often quote emails and other documents. Because direct evidence of what happened has been so lacking it has been important to refer at some length to the emails, briefs and other documents to explain how the Commission has reached its conclusions.

The next part of the report is concerned with the Scheme’s impact on those income support recipients to whom it was directed and also with the effects on DHS staff of having to administer it. Then there is a chapter which makes clear the Scheme’s economic costs, including the unreality of its projected savings, the costs of administering it, the costs of seeking expert assistance to try to remedy its failings, the costs of inquiries into it, including this one, and the costs of settling the class action and cancelling those debts based on averaging.

What follows is some description and discussion of automated decision making and data matching, both of which were features of the Scheme, and a chapter which is concerned with the debt recovery processes used.

The following section of the report deals with what might loosely be described as the checks and balances which might have operated to prevent the Scheme’s continuation, but did not or could not: the parts played by the lawyers involved, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

There is then a chapter with some modest proposals concerning the Australian Public Service, followed by the Commissioner's conclusions.