Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Seselja for his question. I think the best description of the government's approach to people who deliberately rip off our welfare system is to basically say: 'We have zero tolerance towards that sort of behaviour.' Overwhelmingly, the majority of people do the right thing, but we are very serious about detecting those who do not. So, as part of the 2014-15 budget, the government announced a $1.7 billion package that will seriously improve my department's ability to detect of payments, to recover debts and to investigate deliberate welfare fraud. The majority of those savings are going to result from a couple of factors: from improved data-matching capabilities that will see the government recoup, we estimate, more than $1 billion by identifying inconsistencies between income tax payments summaries provided by the Australian Tax Office and income declared to the Department of Human Services in three financial years—during 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13. It is a measure which deals with people who received an income support payment and also received income through employment that has not been declared to the department of human services.

The government expects to uncover undeclared income that may range between several fortnights to a few years and that will result in individual cases of debts between $1000 and $50,000. The budget measure provides funding that will make the processing and recovery of these debts effective for the first time. The budget measure also provides funding for a new Welfare Fraud Task Force to identify and investigate potential fraud hotspots specifically. We will also enable the department to automate our data matching with the Australian Transaction and Reports Analysis Centre—AUSTRAC—to further improve our ability to identify those potential offenders who may have unexplained wealth. (Time expired)