The Australian Taxation Office’s second commissioner in charge of the revenue agency’s client engagement group, Jeremy Hirschhorn, has revisited the prospect of the agency collaborating with Services Australia to enable the near-time automation of earnings checks for welfare recipients to inform benefits payments.
In a quiet but tectonic shift that could ultimately relieve millions of Australians of the drudgery and fear around regular manual income reporting that is cross-checked against benefits and entitlements flowing from Centrelink and Services Australia, Hirschhorn confirmed work is underway to revisit the core cross-agency automation function that robodebt so horribly botched.