Centrelink agrees to process claims within "the agreed timeliness standard", but well over 75 per cent of some types of claim fall outside this period, according to data from Services Australia tabled at Senate estimates this week.
The department has not given a further explanation of exactly what the agreed timeliness standard is, although data tabled at Senate estimates showed that only 43 per cent of total claims were processed within the standards in the first four months of this year.
Between 1 January and 1 May, only 10 per cent of Youth Allowance Apprentice claims were processed on time, making this the group with the worst processing time.
In the same period, 23 per cent of Austudy claims were processed on time, compared to 29 per cent of Youth Allowance Student claims.
Source: SBS News
Services Australia chief executive David Hazlehurst said the department had been working hard to clear claim backlogs and had recently boosted staff numbers.
"As I said in February, our first priority has been to clear the Agency's claims on hand — the backlog," he told Senate Budget estimates on Monday.
"At that time, I outlined that Social Security and Health claims on-hand went on to peak at 1.35 million in February."
Since then, "with the onboarding, training and now contribution, of more than 5,000 staff, we have been able to cut the backlog by more than half," Hazlehurst said.
Data tabled at estimates shows some Centrelink claims that were in the backlog between 1 January and 1 May were taking, on average, nearly half a year to be processed.
The backlog contained 1,522,706 claims on 1 May.
Just under half of these, or 741,938, had been on hand for over 120 days.
Source: SBS News
Age Pension claims took on average 84 days to be processed, while Carer Payment claims took an average of 58 days. Parenting Payment Partnered claims took an average of 63 days, and Youth Allowance Apprentice claims took an average of 59 days to be processed.
The average time for all Centrelink claims to be processed was 41 days.
Call wait times for people ringing Centrelink have also gone up.
In the year to 31 March 2024, Centrelink handled 33,228,257 calls, up from 31,873,109 in the year to 31 March 2023. As the volume of calls increased so did call wait times — the average time to answer was 31 minutes and 55 seconds this year compared to 21 minutes and 19 seconds last year.
Hazlehurst said: "We have turned the corner, but we’re far from declaring victory."
"We know we have more to do on processing and call waiting times."
A 2023 report from the Auditor-General found: "The Department of Social Services and Services Australia’s processes for monitoring, reporting and continuously improving payment timeliness are partly effective."
But "the methodology for measuring welfare claim processing timeliness is not robust".
