Outgoing Commonwealth Ombudsman Philippa Smith has cited problems with the quality and accountability of oral advice as one of the most enduring issue facing public administrators, and citizens seeking information about their entitlements from government agencies.
Ms Smith: ‘In my five years as Ombudsman, the problems associated with both the delivery and accuracy of oral advice, have caused citizens more frustration, upset and loss of entitlements than any other issue.’
‘And although we have increased citizens’ and agencies’ awareness of the problems that can be created by oral advice, solving them remains a challenge for governments and administrators if they are to be fair dinkum about improving service delivery and fulfilling their obligations to citizens.
Ms Smith said providing information to citizens was one of the most important services of any government. ‘If a government is to fulfil its obligations to its citizens it must provide them with accurate, relevant, helpful and timely information,’ she said.
‘To meet this obligation, agencies must achieve twin goals. First they must improve the quality of their oral advice services and ensure there are enough checks and balances to minimise the risks of wrong advice. And then they should change the outdated compensation arrangements which make it very hard for people to be compensated for benefits that would have been paid if they had received the correct advice from the responsible agency in the first place.’
Ms Smith said people generally assumed that advice from a government agency was reliable and that they should be able to act on that advice. ‘Given the complexity of the rules and administration, most people need to rely on the relevant department as the expert on the advice and information they require,’ she said.
Mistakes happen
Ms Smith said oral advice was becoming an increasingly popular form of information delivery.
DSS Teleservice centres dealt with more than 12 million calls during 1996-97, and if the projections were correct, the Teleservice centres would take around 18 million calls during 1997-98.
‘People appear to like the immediacy of oral advice, yet oral advice is by nature much riskier than a written transaction,’ Ms Smith said.
‘There is often no record kept of what was said, and this can cause disagreements when things go wrong, or even denial that the disputed advice was ever given.’
Ms Smith said that current delivery and accountability arrangements for oral advice were often poor quality, and had not kept pace with changes in the public sector.
‘When cost cutting pressures are combined with increasing numbers of people seeking advice, mistakes happen,’ Ms Smith said. ‘Unfortunately the risks and consequences of these mistakes have been unfairly transferred to clients who are the least equipped to negotiate their way through the complex bureaucratic maze.
‘We understand that some agencies anticipate five per cent as the likely error rate in their public transactions. This may be an acceptable statistical limit, but it still means that thousands of people who receive wrong advice will miss out on entitlements,’ Ms Smith said.
The Ombudsman’s Office recently conducted a telephone survey of various agencies’ oral advice services to gauge their efficiency of delivery, and quality of advice.
‘When Ombudsman staff sought oral advice about a range of common scenarios from officers at Tax, Centrelink and the Child Support Agency, they obtained wrong or incomplete advice in a high proportion of cases,’ Ms Smith said.
Since July 1995 the Ombudsman’s Office has received around 7,000 complaints about the quality of advice provided by DSS, DEETYA, the Tax Office and the Child Support Agency, and this seems to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Ms Smith said that many of these complaints reflected a range of service delivery issues including:
- complexity of the rules and a requirement for clients to ‘ask the right questions’ or miss out on entitlements, and
- poor advice and little explanation as to why decisions were made, often to the financial detriment of clients.
Need for more pro-active service delivery
The Ombudsman also called on agencies like DSS and Centrelink to provide a more user friendly claims process to alleviate some of the oral advice problems, including:
- developing a more pro-active approach to claims processing where clients could present their circumstances, and have a departmental officer give them information about the options that may be available, and
- identifying people who were ‘at risk’, for example, those whose circumstances were changeable, and in these cases being more careful in following through the options and/or providing written confirmation of that advice.
Compensation issues
The Commonwealth Ombudsman’s 1996-97 Annual Report presents several cases where people ‘fell between the cracks’ created by anomalies in compensation arrangements. It also identified the following problems with compensation arrangements:
- application of a three month statutory time limit beyond which people could not apply for payments they would have received if they had been given the right advice in the first instance
- the notion that defective administration should be especially ‘bad’ before compensation could be paid, and
- application of a narrow and legalistic approach to when act of grace payments could be made.
Ms Smith said changes to the compensation arrangements should mean that the consequences of system failure were moved from the client to the agency. ‘The risk is currently being unfairly borne by clients and potential clients who are not in a position to help themselves.’
The Ombudsman released a report titled ‘Issues relating to oral advice, clients beware’, which discusses risk management procedures for agencies providing oral advice to their clients, and profiles the cases of people who have lost benefits or entitlements after receiving incorrect advice from agencies like DSS, DEETYA (now Centrelink) and the Australian Taxation Office.
Media Contact
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Email – Media@ombudsman.gov.au
Date of release: 14 January 1998