A former employee of one of Australia’s biggest job network providers has spoken up about the extreme methods they use to claim public money when jobseekers find employment.
One researcher called the process – supposedly designed to help people enter the workforce or increase their hours – a “crazy system that doesn’t work for anyone”.
Jobseekers must sign up with a private job provider to receive Centrelink benefits, which they can continue to claim if they have work but are earning below a certain threshold.
The providers can claim “outcome payments” when a client on their books has completed four, 12 and 26 weeks of employment, regardless of whether the client or provider found the job, using payslips as proof of the client’s employment. In 2022-23 providers received $329m in outcome payments.
But jobseekers, employers and former staff at the providers say the requirement to obtain payslips has led providers to put unreasonable pressure on clients – who are not obliged to hand over the information – and employers.
In some cases providers trying to obtain payslips have forced jobseekers’ Centrelink payments to be suspended.
Prof Jo Ingold of the Peter Faber business school at the Australian Catholic University said the system did not work for jobseekers, providers or employees.
“It is … obviously very stressful and horrible for somebody to go through effectively having their payments suspended because they’re not providing information that … it is within their right not to provide,” she said.
“But then the providers desperately scramble to get evidence to meet their claim for the outcome payment. It’s just a crazy system that doesn’t work for anyone.”
‘They would track them down’
Alan* worked as an employment consultant for a job provider in Western Australia last year.
He said there was a member of his team whose sole job it was to check whether jobseekers had employment and try to get the details so that the provider could claim an outcome payment when they reached the four-, 12- or 26-week milestone.
“Their job was to collate all the claims we had and go through and notify us as individual employment partners when we had claims coming up and who we should be tracking … If we weren’t able to get hold of them, they would … try to track them down.
“They’ll look at them on Facebook, they’ll … phone their employers out of the blue … They’re doing this on a daily basis.”
He said the team was encouraged to target participants who were long-term unemployed or Indigenous, as the provider gets a higher payout when they become employed.
He said the company had an internal system to track how many weeks a jobseeker had been in work, and which prompted providers to ask for payslips at certain points.
“These are jobs we haven’t had anything to do with,” he said. “A lot of the time, people are getting their own jobs and all we’re doing is claiming money for them.”
To keep receiving benefits, jobseekers must meet “mutual obligations” requirements such as applying for jobs and courses, and attending interviews with their providers.
Alan said one method of forcing jobseekers to pass on payslips was to set up a requirement the provider knew the client could not meet, which would trigger a suspension of their benefits.
“If somebody’s working you can just book them in for an appointment that you know they can’t attend if you’re not getting the payslips. When they don’t attend, you just say ‘not attended’ and it’s cut the payment off automatically.”
Alan said employees of the provider were also told to put pressure on jobseekers to hand over payslips by withholding grants from the employment fund – a pool of money providers can use to help jobseekers find work by covering costs such as new work boots or car registration.
He said his manager told him not to spend money from the fund “unless there was something in it” for the provider.
“As part of our mandate, we should be offering these things, but my particular manager would only allow us to do this if we were ‘tracking for a claim’.”
Pressure on employers
Dani*, who lives in Victoria, said in March her provider threatened to put her Centrelink payments on hold unless she gave them the payslips for the cleaning job she has had for seven years.
Providers can sometimes claim payments even when the jobseeker found a job before starting with them. In March Guardian Australia revealed the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations paid providers more than $3.6m in the past five years for pre-existing employment.
“She wouldn’t put my hours in the system … without a payslip,” Dani said.
“You’re not obligated to provide it, they can ask, but I said ‘no, I won’t be doing that’.”
After the phone call she was sent a message saying her payments would be suspended because she had not met her requirements. Dani has been unable to transfer to a different provider because that alleged failure is now on her record in the system.
“I’ve been working since I was 15,” she said. “I’m a single mum, I try to do the right thing.
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“[They’re] just money hungry. They don’t really want [to help] me unless they can get their outcome payment.”
Jim Daly ran a business in South Australia for seven years, employing up to 20 staff. He said he would routinely get calls from job providers asking for his staff’s payslip details.
“None of my staff ever came to me through the services of a job network provider,” Daly said.
“But they were on the phone to me every Monday or Friday, demanding information about the people who I did have on the books.”
He said he always refused, leaving it to his staff to declare their hours if they wished – but they would still ring him. He said at one point in 2019 a provider threatened to suspend his employees’ benefits.
“[They said] if you do not provide us with the information that we are asking for, we will contact Centrelink and have their payments cut off.”
Will privatisation be rolled back?
A spokesperson for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) said it had regularly told providers not to press jobseekers for payslip details.
“Providers should not repeatedly ask or pressure clients for payslips under any circumstance,” they said. “This has been made clear to providers on a number of occasions.
“While providers are allowed to ask for payslip details, jobseekers are under no obligation to hand over the details.”
Guardian Australia put questions to the job providers referred to in the above examples, but all either failed to respond or declined to comment on individual cases.
The chief executive of the National Employment Services Association, Kathryn Mandla, said the organisation had “advocated that the overarching principle for the employment services system … is that the best interests of jobseekers should be paramount”.
“Employment service providers are legally required by government to assist each participant on their caseload to progress towards and sustain suitable employment.”
Simone Casey is a research associate at RMIT’s Centre for People, Organisation and Work. She said DEWR needed to make the rules clear and enforce them.
“Overall, there’s a lack of clarity about the circumstances in which providers should be seeking payslips. There’s inconsistency in guidelines … And DEWR is not telling providers clearly that jobseekers have the right to decline requests for payslips.
“Providers wield their power, threatening people with cutting off their payments to obtain the information about the employers without respecting or complying with the actual information and privacy protection laws.”
Kristin O’Connell of the Antipoverty Centre said the information job providers were trying to get access to was already known to Centrelink.
“We already report our income to Centrelink … the job agency has no need for that information, except to maximise the amount of money they extract out of the system for jobs that we find ourselves,” she said.
“There’s no reason these job agencies need these payslips. The government absolutely has the power to direct them to stop being intrusive, and requesting this information from people who don’t want to give it. It’s really that simple.”
Last year’s federal inquiry into the sector found the privatisation of the employment services system had failed and recommended the establishment of a large government-run provider.
The government has yet to respond to the recommendation, but the national secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union, Melissa Donnelly, said it should be adopted without reservation.
“Privatisation puts profit before people and has led to a compromised and ineffective employment services system,” she said.
“This system doesn’t work for people looking for a job or for employers looking for workers, and no amount of tweaking the existing system will fix that.”
* Names have been changed