What actually is a payment interval? i.e. what period of time?
Which is kind of what I suggested above regarding the ghost of robodebt. 
I am no longer up with the details, it has varied over time.
The income received in the fortnight of Income support entitlement for Jobsearch, Newstart and similar unemployment payments. Pensioners could be assessed on Yearly income depending on the nature of the income eg Rental income or on fortnightly entitlement eg pay from work. Family Tax Benefit is usually on Yearly unless there has been a significant change in income received.
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So if I am understanding this correctly, in order to use ATO data for these welfare payments, the welfare recipient would have to submit tax returns fortnightly? Any less frequent information to the ATO and Centrelink would have to guess how the ATO-reported income was distributed across the fortnights? Might be uniform (averaged). Might not be uniform.
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Correct as the ATO only shows income earnt during normally the entire financial year. As an example:
A person receives income support for 6 months from July with no other income
The next 6 months the person earns $120,000 as they found a very well paying job
The Group Certificates (Electronically lodged these days) would both indicate the amounts earnt from 1 July to 30 June.
Under the rules they are entitled to that 6 months income support and do not have an overpayment.
However Centrelink on Robodebt gets advice that the ex client earnt $120,000 during the financial year. They average the $120,000 over the 12 months and say the ex client was not entitled to the income support. But they in fact were legally entitled as noted above.
To legally raise the debt Centrelink must prove that $120,000 was earnt over the entire year including the months the ex client was on income support and they must further show how each payment period of income support was affected by the income earnt in that same payment period. They could be for instance be told that a client earnt $150 during one payment period this would affect their payment by $23 for that period (allowed income without affected payment is $104 per fnt between $104 & $254 the Jobseeker payment is reduced by $0.50 per $1 earnt and after $254 it is $0.60 per $1 until the Jobseeker payment is reduced to $0).
If they cease Jobseeker for say 2 months (any period outside their Jobseeker payment period) they can earn as much as they like then they could go back on Jobseeker for another say 1 month while having no other income or insufficient income to totally preclude Jobseeker payments and they as long as they declared the income in the proper fortnight they would not have an overpayment.
Seasonal workers do have a different treatment but this is generally outside the debts raised by Robodebt.
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Another article regarding persons driven to commiting suicide by the disgusting robodebt scam.
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For the record, these days, with Single Touch Payroll (STP), the ATO would receive electronically information for each pay period of the paying company. So in your hypothetical example, the ATO would know pretty much exactly when the payments were received. Well, except maybe if the pay is a “cashie”.
Not all employers will necessarily be doing STP yet, as it is still being phased in. STP is completely separate from the BAS and, as far as I know, completely separate from (what used to be called) a Group Certificate (now called a Payment Summary) and completely separate from SuperStream (electronic advice to the government of superannuation payments made by the employer on behalf of the employee). However “completely separate” does not mean that they can’t be cross-checked - since clearly there is a lot of redundancy in all that electronic information.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to explain what the actual problem is. In all the politically-motivated hoo-haa, proper explanation is often omitted or lost. 
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Robodebt was not using current data, matching was for prior year periods so still using payment summaries or as they were previously know as Group Certificates. This goes to previous years. If it was current pay periods clients could easily prove current incomes as pay slips/proof of payment could still be obtained. These robodebts in some cases went back at least a decade and many were outside the 7 year retention of records periods so difficult for clients to get payment details from their employers.
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So in a nutshell:
- The ATO data was not sufficiently detailed to accurately assess entitlements with short assessment intervals like NewStart (or whatever it is called now, it used to be Unemployment Benefit).
- Not being able to calculate the entitlements correctly using ATO data they fudged it by averaging the ATO data and notionally apportioning it to each assessment period, regardless of what was actually earned during that interval.
- They then decreed that the assessment resulting from that bastardised process (now ruled illegal) was how debt would be raised unless the client had their own evidence (payslips etc) to show otherwise.
- Some clients had the evidence and after some trouble got correct reassessments. Many did not.
- Further they went back up to 6 years having told clients they did not need to keep records for that long.
So somehow the agency, that is supposed to support citizens in their time of need, set up a system that instead screwed them with their pants on.
Who was responsible?
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Further than 6 years many 7 years or older.
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More damming evidence regarding the disgusting robodebt scam.
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The Federal Government may have to pay interest to their robodebt victims.
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“more expensive for the taxpayer” FTFY
Labor supports calls for a Royal Commission into the robodebt scam.
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The robodebt scam saga continues.
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Robodebt scam repayments are underway.
The Robodebt Scam keeps on keeping on.
Quietly in the background CentreLink is building a new system to calculate payments. It will also extend to Medicare and Aged Care payments. Implementation to be completed in 2023 the solution is planned to be progressively introduced from mid 2021. Just in case anyone is wondering what the exposure might be, Government Services Minister Stuart Robert is responsible.
Hopefully the robot that giveth and the robot that recently was programmed to taketh have the same matching algorithms. Or perhaps best not. 
The contract has been awarded to Infosys an Indian owned solutions provider. ITNews suggested a further 200 employees would be required for the project.
https://www.infosys.com/careers/location/australia-new-zealand.html
As do the lies and cop-outs.
