Services Australia

Robodebt was not simply a defective calculation performed at scale. It was a public-administration system in which an unresolved question of legal authority became a production rule, annual tax data was treated as evidence about fortnightly income, and the practical burden of disproving a debt moved toward people least equipped to reconstruct old payroll records. The accountability question is therefore wider than who wrote software. It is who owned the legal basis, the data assumptions, the decision rule, the notice, the review path, the stop decision, the refund, and proof that the same institutional pattern cannot recur.