It will depend on how much power they give to it before we can assess it’s benefits if they ever do create a Fed ICAC. Do I think the current political market will allow themselves to be lashed by a cat’O’nine tails if they don’t have to? Most emphatically No I don’t think they will. Of course I may be wrong and we may have a great deal many masochists in that rarefied Federal hothouse who are just bursting at the seams to be dealt severe punishment.
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Interesting concept. Has Australian politics evolved to the point that it warrants the title of this thread?
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Don’t blame the employees scrambling to apply a policy that was dreamed up on the run without sufficient staff to implement it by a government that seemingly cannot get the basics right.
I am not a fan of Centrelink, but as our Prime Minister stated recently the modern public service is not to do policy - it should only implement the government’s policies.
Auditors today are required to consider risks and benefits in analysing whether money has been adequately accounted for. Had current standards applied in 1974, I suspect the auditors would have said something quite different given the circumstances and state of banking services at the time.
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A government apparently acting illegally and ordering its public servants to do the same. Apparently all done with eyes wide open and they simply reject accusations, stonewall, and move on with impunity.
Our political system is beyond broken since we, the electorate, seem to have no recourse to hold government accountable for acting illegally, whether or not we support any particular policy, excepting at election times. Between elections it seems open slather until the bribes get rolled out prior to the next one, and so many just forget and return them because of some sports funding or whatever directed to their electorates.
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Perhaps they should be looking more closely at what some doctors are doing.
20 months for $360,000. Nice money if you can get it.
The court almost certainly recovered the money - or assets acquired with it. In the meantime, the guy’s entire career is burned. So much for six years of medical school.
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One can only hope.
I turned to the court records to see what the judgement was, but it does not appear to have been posted yet. This article states that:
A commercial property Bakare owns is likely to be sold to repay the money.
Of course, the judge also pointed out that investigation costs were covered by the taxpayer.
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Even more amusing that dead patients are something that doctors try really hard to avoid but this doctor has found a way to make them lucrative. 
Apart from the usual mixture of mirth and outrage …
- Be careful what you wish for.
The obvious solution to the problem that happened here is a rerun of Australia Card. If you want us all to be given a unique number for whole-of-government tracking then you’ll like that.
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Given the coincidence of “same name, same suburb name, same birthday” perhaps this will not occur again in our lifetime, so not worth getting too concerned about?
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There are some clear “learnings for make benefit glorious nation of Australia” that Centrelink might want to ponder
e.g. flag all customers that are not unique to full name + birthday and always require additional checking when dealing with those customers in order to make sure that the correct customer has been selected. (I have heard of the exact same problem occurring in contexts that are nothing to do with government. It can be the source of some customer and customer service angst - and unpleasant privacy breaches.)
e.g. add logic to detect the obvious contradiction between a parenting allowance and not having kids. Centrelink would generally know whether a client has kids or not as there are a number of payments that depend on it.
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A barcode tattooed on the forehead. Scanners on every doorway and at every appointment medical and otherwise. Of course baseball caps would have to be illegal, unless worn fashionably (ie backwards). Media personalities would be able to make application to have theirs on some other conspicuous part of their body to preserve their visage. That would require additional cameras focused lower down. All quite doable really.
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I think supplemented by a microchip, for we are just a companion animal of our government.
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I moved to Houston TX USA with my then wife. I started getting calls from young ladies looking for ‘me’. My wife was not amused. The young ladies thought they were being fobbed off when I said ‘it is not me’. After a few weeks I discovered a younger single man sharing my name moved to Houston at the same time - he was a ‘major league baseball player agent’ and well known in his circles. He had a bevy of ‘angry young ladies to contend with’. At the time directory services had me atop their list with ‘our name’ and being an uncommon name usually looked no further when queried for ‘our’ number(s).
The young ladies eventually found his contact details. I was now divorced but no more young ladies ringing. I would have loved to meet some of them, then, but such is life.
Fast forward another year and I was being sued. Fortunately it only took a phone call to discover ‘he’ was being sued, and it got straightened out with a few hours of angst, a minor kerfuffle, and a good story after the fact.
Years later I was boarding a plane back to Houston from Toronto. When I tried to check in they told me I had already checked in. The agent stared at his CRT and after a brief time printed a boarding pass but just ran. He returned with my boarding pass. Guess who was on the same flight! We never met. He still represents major league baseball players. I doubt Melbourne is in his future.
Only when I visit cities in the USA with major league baseball teams 
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“All care, no responsibility”, they used to say. Now it seems to be “No care, no responsibility”.
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Interesting, amusing. Maybe it’s a legally sound argument, but a politically risky one.
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Of course because most people would be asking “why don’t they have a duty of care under the Act?”
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Or political opponents would be paraphrasing it as “the government doesn’t care”.
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Centrelink stupidity strikes again.
What a shame that the screw ups are never with their payroll computers. A few weeks with no pay might just wake them up to what happens in the real world.
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In what sense is this a scam, are you really saying this is a case of a ruse, swindle or racket?
Maybe there ought to be separate threads for fraudulent schemes, legally doubtful government policy and public IT failures.
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Yep, Issues with how Centrelink have failed at least the pub test and worse seem very different to how others have ripped through deliberate fraud millions from everyday consumers. The original post in this topic said.
When there are losses due to the actions of government it is in a different class.
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