Mr Danby asked the Minister representing the Minister for Family and Community Services, upon notice, on 5 December 2002:

(1) For (a) 1999-2000, (b) 2000-2001 and (c) 2001-2002, how many, and what percentage of, persons were audited by Centrelink.

(2) What percentage of audits uncovered mistakes or fraud which resulted in a debt being raised against the person for each year.

(3) What was the average debt for each year.

(4) What was the average fine or penalty imposed on persons discovered to have made a mistake or committed fraud for each year.

(5) What was the gross sum of (a) debt and (b) fines or penalties imposed on these persons for each year.

(6) What were the administrative and compliance costs for these audits for each year.

Mr Anthony (Minister for Children and Youth Affairs) —The Minister for Family and Community Services has provided the following answer to the honourable member's question:

(1) Review activity is conducted to assess a customer's ongoing entitlement to payment(s) and for this reason Centrelink records the number of reviews conducted, as opposed to the number of customers being reviewed. Some customers may have been reviewed more than once during a financial year if they were receiving more than one payment, or if reviews were undertaken at more frequent intervals.

(2) Centrelink does not issue fines to Centrelink customers. `Gross fines or penalties' is based on financial fines/penalties resulting from prosecution activity. These consist of fines, poor box donations and pecuniary penalties. A significant number of penalties are time based rather than financially based. Good behaviour bonds and periods of detention are examples.

(3) Centrelink is currently developing and implementing a Strategic Cost Management Framework that is based on actual workloads undertaken by Centrelink. Output levels are predominantly identified by capturing transaction volumes from the mainframe system and applying a work effort value to each transaction. These transactions are then matched to operational costs.

This methodology has been used to calculate the costs of reviewing customers, raising and recovering debts, optical surveillance and prosecution of fraud for each of the financial years.