Payslip harassment: another scandal of maladministration and exploitation in the Australian welfare system
New documents obtained by AUWU under FOI expose the use of payment suspensions by privatised employment service providers who aren’t held to account by the government’s contract compliance processes.
After persistent campaigning from the AUWU, the Department of Employment has finally begun to investigate Workforce Australia service providers for using harsh, and prohibited, punishments to elicit payslip information from job seekers (in order to boost profits).
According to new FOI’d documents, four providers have now been identified by the Department as potentially in breach of the Deed and the Workforce Australia guidelines for “threatening” participants who “do not comply with the request to produce payslips.” This includes APM (or Serendipity WA)– the largest job agency in the system – which has now been put under a Program Assurance Activity, because of its conduct in obtaining payslips.
Leading up to this point, the Department didn’t want to publicly admit that there was a problem. In the last round of Senate Estimates, they claimed, as of June 3rd, that they weren’t aware of any cases where service providers were using inappropriate methods to hound participants for their payslips.
However, the FOI’d documents, which include complaints registered on Departmental IT systems, as well as their correspondence with providers, show otherwise: not only was the Department aware of this conduct, but they had been privately telling providers to stop it.
The Department, careful as it is to limit bad PR, operates an effective protection racket for its providers – hiding and ignoring cases of abuse and misconduct at the expense of victims who report it.
After helping victims of payslip harassment document their cases over a number of months, it’s telling that we had to resort to using the Freedom of Information Act to find out what the Department was doing to resolve these complaints.
The FOI reveals that the Department simply refers complainants directly back to the provider they’ve lodged the complaint about, then marks the issue “solved” on their IT systems. Here, in lieu of a proper accountability process, the government shunts victims back to the company that’s hurting them, before dusting it’s hands, burying the file in their system, and saying “case closed”.
Of course, all of this points to deeper issues at the core of the privatised system of “mutual” obligations; namely, how it bullies, penalises and exploits people who seek paid work while accessing the lowest income support payment in the OECD.
However, pointed questions should also be asked of the government’s appalling administration of this outsourced system: the Employment Minister and his Department are aware that providers are engaging in conduct, repeatedly, that breaches the terms of their contracts; yet, to date, none of these companies have had their operations suspended or funding removed.
Background
Unemployed workers are forced to sign up with a private job provider to receive the “JobSeeker” income support payment, which recipients can continue to claim if they have paid work but are earning below a certain threshold.
Job providers can claim “outcome payments” from the government when a participant on their books has completed four, 12 and 26 weeks of employment, regardless of how the client found the job, using payslips as proof of the participant’s employment. In 2022-23, providers received $329m in outcome payments.
Job agencies have systems in place, and staff specifically employed, to chase down payslip information from clients, so they can maximise their outcome payments. In their submission to the 2022-23 Workforce Australia Inquiry, The Salvation Army said one of their Workforce Australia programs employed 47 workers, “dedicated to chasing” participants’ payslip information.
Jobseekers are under no obligation to provide payslips to their job service provider. It is a breach of the Workforce Australia Services Deed of Standing Offer 2022-2028 and the Workforce Australia Guidelines for providers to use the Targeted Compliance Framework (i.e. issue payment suspensions, or compliance penalties), if participants do not produce payslip information.
Since 2016, the AUWU has been documenting cases where providers have harassed and threatened participants to provide payslips. It continues to be one of the most common issues our advocacy team assists people with.
Multiple participants submitted to the government’s recent Workforce Australia Inquiry to complain that their job providers improperly demanded their payslips. For example, in submission 142 a witness said their job agent blackmailed them by refusing “to offer any more support” unless they supplied their payslips. In submission 224, a witness said they are “continually being hounded for payslips” and their provider contacted their employer without their permission.
Despite this, there was no mention at all of payslip harassment in the Workforce Australia Committee’s final report. This is an issue that governments and departments continue to hide behind the couch. We decided it was beyond time to bring it out, fully, into the open.
The investigation
In March 2024, AUWU embarked on a public investigation with The Guardian, which revealed that multiple Job Service Providers are using an array of tactics, in defiance of the Deed and Guidelines, to harass and bully job seekers for their payslip information.
As part of the investigation, multiple participants have supplied written proof that, in order to obtain their payslip information, their Workforce Australia or DES job providers have:
threatened and suspended their Centrelink payments
created mandatory appointments for the sole purpose of soliciting payslip information
hounded them incessantly by phone and email
contacted their employer without their permission
and withheld their access to the Employment Fund.
The stories and details covered by these news stories are shocking. APM, Australia’s largest job agency, threatened and harassed a woman, recovering from multiple spinal injuries, to sign off on a fake payslip, so they could get an outcome bonus from the government.
Nathan, another participant, told the Guardian that, when he got a job himself as an assistant manager, AtWork Australia cut his payments because he wouldn’t give them his payslips. Jessica said that, when she found her own part-time job, APM contacted her employer without her permission for employment information, then told her to sign paperwork backdated to before she started the job, saying APM had helped her find it.
According to the Workforce Australia Guidelines Part A, “the Provider’s Personnel may commit a criminal offence if they disclose Protected Information to other staff or third parties who do not need to know that information”. According to the same guidelines, “if an individual receives a social security benefit or payment, that individual’s information (including their name, date of birth and contact details) will likely be both personal and Protected Information.” To date, despite many referrals of such behaviour to the Department we have not seen any such offences charged against providers or offending personnel.
A former job agent also told the Guardian about the routine staff practice of tracking participants down “on a daily basis” for payslip information. The ex-agent said that his large agency targeted participants “who were long-term unemployed or Indigenous, as the provider gets a higher payout when they become employed.” He also confirmed that job agencies are deliberately suspending people’s payments, if they don't give them the job information they need.
These media stories generated a significant response on social media, where hundreds of people have relayed their experiences of being similarly targeted or harassed by their job provider for their payslips.
On June 3rd, the Department told Senate estimates they’d issued two general notices to all providers (April 8th, 29th) – just after our public investigation launched – telling them to stop harassing people for their payslips. They then told the Senate that they were “not aware” at that time of any providers who were continuing to pressure participants for this information.
An FOI request for documents submitted by the AUWU (on July 10th) reveals, however, that this statement can’t possibly be true. We now know that, around this time, the Department received multiple complaints about payslip harassment, explicitly emailed providers to stop this behaviour, and privately pulled up at least four of them on potential breaches of their government contracts.
We contend that, in that Estimates hearing, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations intentionally misled the Senate.
The FOI
In a series of FOI’d emails from May-July, the Department’s Compliance Team told multiple providers they needed to stop using the TCF to harass jobseekers, saying that they “regularly identif[y] cases where a provider appointment has been scheduled for the primary purpose of obtaining payslips”.
The FOI’d documents additionally reveal that the Department, in fact, received numerous complaints from participants about payslip harassment on their IT system in June. For example:
June 17th: a participant reported that APM suspended their payment unfairly while they were at work, and wouldn’t remove the suspension until they provided their payslips.
June 18th: two participants reported that their agencies threatened them with payment suspensions if they didn’t produce payslips
June 20th: a participant reported that the Salvos threatened to suspend their payments over payslip refusal
The Workforce Australia Provider Support Division sent an email to the Salvos, detailing their “inappropriate TCF application of provider appointments, job referrals and evidence requests” in the period of June 3-14 – telling them to stop using the TCF for the purpose of attaining payslips, and asking them to provide “reasons why these bookings and requests have been made.” June 3 is an auspicious start date for that time period, given that it was on June 3 precisely that the Department was trying to claim this behaviour was quite limited and that they didn’t know about any other instances of it.
On July 5th, the Department sent an email to APM, saying that they have evidence “in the Department IT systems” that their staff are “currently engaging in behaviours that may be in breach of the Deed and the Workforce Australia guidelines”: namely, “threatening the use of the Targeted Compliance framework if participants to do not comply with the request to produce payslips.”
Based on their evidence, the Department accused APM of “booking appointments for Participants with the intention of compelling them to provide payslips, recording demerits if the Participant does not supply the requested payslips and subsequently removing the demerits once payslips have been provided.”
The Department sent similar emails to three other providers (names redacted) on June 20, June 27 and July 3.
After we lodged the FOI, the Department finally admitted, publicly, that it has a problem
On August 8th, the new Employment Services Minister Murray Watt used his first speech to providers to scold them for harassing people for payslip information, saying: “We are watching provider behaviour closely, and we won’t tolerate those providers who are doing the wrong thing.”
At the same forum, Department Secretary Natalie James said: “I’m pretty disappointed that this kind of thing was coming out in the media and that somehow within our systems…we weren’t resolving that. Because clearly the Targeted Compliance Framework is not there to put pressure on people who are in a job, or to do something that is in the interests of a provider.”
[Note: analysis from Economic Justice Australia shows that the Department’s complaints system is deliberately designed not to resolve these issues, and leaves participants with nowhere to go except the media].
To our knowledge, there have been no punishments or penalties inflicted on any provider for engaging in this conduct. Meanwhile, in the three month period from April to June 2024, Workforce Australia providers inflicted 433, 935 payment suspensions on participants.
The AUWU is still receiving reports of participants being bullied for their payslips.
Why is payslip harassment such a feature of the welfare system?
1) Simply put: private providers want as much money and profit as possible.
The system requires providers to upload payslip evidence to support claims for outcome payments, so the more payslips they can get, the more Lamborghinis Sarina Russo can buy.
2) Providers can’t get the information by simply asking their “clients” politely.
Participants have the right to refuse requests for their payslips. And they’re usually in no mood to do favours (i.e. divulge their own private information) for companies that do little except punish and exploit them.
The issue for providers seeking to maximise profit is that there is almost no reason, or benefit, for participants in the system to voluntarily supply this information – ironically, a key reason why providers don’t already have the job information is because they had no hand in sourcing or providing the jobs. By and large, participants in the system find their own jobs without any help from their provider: Anglicare’s latest job snapshot recommended ending compulsory participation with providers because they’re failing to get people into work. Even the government’s Workforce Australia Inquiry report concluded that rather than providing jobs, “we have an inefficient, outsourced, fragmented social security compliance management system that sometimes gets someone a job against all odds.”
3) Providers know they can easily bully clients for this info
Luckily, for providers, they’ve been given extraordinary powers by the government over a marginalised, powerless client base. And, they know there are basically no serious consequences (beyond an empty Departmental “talking-to”) for misusing these powers. The Department’s complaints process (also detailed in the FOI’d documents), explicitly works to shield providers from accountability: when participants complain to the Department about payslip bullying, they are immediately referred back to their provider (yes, the company doing the bullying) to resolve the issue.
As all the evidence shows, providers are simply using the tools they have available (or the threat of them), and the system explicitly built for them, to force participants to give them what they want, when they want it, so they can achieve maximum profit.
The Department’s submission to the Workforce Australia Inquiry also provides a decent summary on how providers get outcome payments via participant’s payslip information:
Providers can also use payslip evidence to contradict Services Australia income reporting information, and have their outcome payments inflated on the basis of payslip evidence. This is what is known as a “payslip verified outcome”. Payslip verified outcomes are based on hours worked only, not income. It is therefore troubling to us that, in the instance reported by The Guardian on 11 August 2024, an APM employee attempted to cause a payslip to be faked specifically at the threshold of hours required to obtain a certain level of outcome payment.
APM Employment Services: the biggest, and worst, private actor in the system
APM is the biggest employment services provider in Australia, racking up $330m in contracts under Workforce Australia over three years.
AUWU receives more complaints about APM than any other provider in Workforce Australia or Disability Employment Services. In terms of sheer numbers, the company inflicts more payment suspensions on Workforce Australia participants than any other provider – averaging over 2,600 payment suspensions per week.
Since 2022, we’ve publicly exposed APM for it’s persistently bad conduct, including:
Fraudulently claiming credit for jobs their clients found themselves
Forcing a woman to sign off on a fake payslip under threat of payment suspension
And, of course, harassing people for their payslip information
The Antipoverty Centre published the results of a survey further documenting APM’s abuse and mistreatment of participants. The company also scored a dismal 1.93/5 from participants on our job agency rating scale.
Despite its persistent, and public, failures and scandals, APM has lost none of its current government contracts. While the government conducted its “Inquiry” into Workforce Australia, APM donated $147,140 to the ALP (between September 17, 2022 and June 29, 2023).
According to an email from July, obtained under FOI by the AUWU, the Department is currently investigating APM for suspected breaches of the Workforce Australia Services Deed and Guidelines over its conduct in obtaining payslips. The Department has now put the provider under a “Program Assurance Activity”. This is a mere slap on the wrist clearly designed to protect the profits APM has gleaned from bullying vulnerable unemployed workers.
The only appropriate penalty here is for DEWR to tear up APM’s provider licence – it’s the only way to ensure unemployed workers are protected from this predatory company.
Media Contact: Jeremy Poxon
0404 089 575 / jeremy@auwu.org.au