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Exclusive: Robodebt Six served NACC findings

Exclusive: Robodebt Six served NACC findings 

Almost three years after referrals were made in the robodebt royal commission’s so-called ‘sealed section’, the NACC is finally preparing to name the Robodebt Six. By Jason Koutsoukis.

An artist’s impression of the six 

unnamed individuals referred to the 

NACC by the robodebt royal commission

The National Anti-Corruption Commission has circulated draft findings to individuals referred to it by the robodebt royal commission, signalling that the investigative phase is effectively complete and a final determination into whether those individuals engaged in corrupt conduct is imminent.

The Saturday Paper understands the findings have been shared with former Department of Human Services secretary Kathryn Campbell but not with her successor, Renée Leon. It is understood at least one former government minister may be among those referred.

The investigation – the most consequential test yet of the Albanese government’s integrity oversight body – comes nearly three years after royal commissioner Catherine Holmes described a “crude and cruel” scheme that illegally pursued hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients.

The NACC investigation stems from sealed referrals made by Holmes in July 2023, after her inquiry found that senior public servants had allowed the income-averaging scheme to proceed despite repeated warnings about its legality.

Holmes stopped short of making findings of corruption but referred six unnamed individuals to the NACC for further examination.

After officially commencing operations on July 1, 2023, the NACC’s approach to robodebt has moved through three distinct phases.

In June 2024, 11 months after Holmes published her report into the robodebt scheme, the NACC announced it would not be pursuing the six royal commission referrals, arguing their conduct had already been “fully explored” by the royal commission and that the NACC was unlikely to obtain “significant new evidence”, with further inquiry risking duplication, inconsistent outcomes and “oppression” through repeated investigations.

Four months later, the NACC announced it would appoint an independent eminent person to reconsider the refusal to investigate the six referrals after the NACC’s independent inspector, Gail Furness, SC, released a scorching report into the agency’s handling of the robodebt referrals.

Her report found that the head of the NACC, Commissioner Paul Brereton, had engaged in officer misconduct for failing to properly manage a declared conflict of interest with a senior public servant known as Referred Person 1. The report said Brereton’s conduct was “not unlawful but arose from a mistake of law or fact”.

In February last year, the NACC’s independent delegate, former High Court justice Geoffrey Nettle, directed the commission to investigate the six referrals. In a statement at the time, the NACC said that the commissioner and deputy commissioners who were involved in the original decision not to investigate the six referrals would not participate in the investigation.

The NACC must now determine whether conduct exposed by the royal commission meets the statutory threshold for corrupt conduct – a finding that carries significant reputational and potential legal consequences.

The NACC Act requires the commission to give any individual a chance to respond before publishing findings or recommendations that criticise their conduct. Those responses must be considered before the NACC settles its final determination. 

The circulation of draft findings does not mean that corruption has been found or that final conclusions are settled. Nor does a finding of corrupt conduct in a NACC report amount to a criminal finding.

If the NACC were to find corrupt conduct, the consequences could range from formal findings in a public report to potential referrals for criminal prosecution. Even absent criminal charges, adverse findings would carry profound reputational consequences for senior officials involved in the scheme – and would represent the first major corruption determination since the NACC was established.

A decision not to make any such findings, however, would likely lead to renewed scrutiny of the NACC and whether its statutory definition of corruption sets too high a bar for determinations.

Introduced by the Abbott government and expanded by the Turnbull and Morrison governments, robodebt used an automated debt-recovery program that sought to claim debts from welfare recipients by averaging their fortnightly income data across a year.

Nearly three years after Catherine Holmes delivered her judgement on robodebt, the scandal is still working its way through Australia’s accountability machinery, with each process asking a different question: how it happened, who failed, and whether any of those failures crossed the line into corruption., and whether any of those failures crossed the line into corruption.

Its central flaw lay in a process that divided a person’s yearly earnings into uniform fortnightly amounts rather than assessing what they actually earnt in each reporting period. For casual and part-time workers with fluctuating work hours, this meant false debts were frequently generated by the income-averaging program, even in cases where their total annual incomes had been correctly declared.

The scheme reversed the traditional burden of proof on welfare recipients, requiring them to demonstrate that they did not owe any money – often by producing employment records dating back many years. The robodebt royal commission ultimately condemned the methodology, finding that it relied on speculation rather than evidence and operated outside the law.

Despite legal concerns being flagged early, including within government, the scheme continued for years.

By late 2019, after the Commonwealth had received advice from the solicitor-general that the income-averaging practice underpinning robodebt was unlawful, the scheme was finally scrapped. A $1.8 billion class-action settlement followed in 2020, with the Albanese government establishing a royal commission in August 2022.

One of commissioner Holmes’s most serious findings concerned how robodebt was presented to cabinet. It found that a key cabinet submission described the scheme as involving “no change” to income assessment processes – a claim it said was “liable to mislead Cabinet” and which senior public servants had acknowledged was untrue.

Holmes placed former Department of Human Services secretary Kathryn Campbell at the centre of robodebt’s administrative failure, finding she had presided over a department that “established, implemented and maintained an unlawful program”.

When information emerged casting doubt on the legality of income averaging, Holmes found Campbell “did nothing of substance” and failed to act on opportunities to obtain advice as to whether the practice was lawful.

In Holmes’s telling, this was not a failure of process alone but of leadership – a secretary who did not intervene decisively when legality became a live and urgent question.

Following the publication of Holmes’s report, the Australian Public Service Commission established a Robodebt Code of Conduct Inquiry Taskforce to examine the actions of public servants associated with robodebt.

Of the 16 people referred to the taskforce, then APS commissioner Gordon de Brouwer ultimately found 12 officials had breached the code 97 times, including failures to properly test legal advice, escalate concerns and exercise due diligence in administering the scheme.

De Brouwer singled out two former departmental secretaries, Campbell and Renée Leon, as having breached the code multiple times in their handling of robodebt, including failing to exercise due care and diligence, properly escalate legal concerns and ensure the lawfulness of the scheme.

Campbell was secretary of Human Services from 2011 to 2017, overseeing the development, rollout and administration of robodebt. Leon, her successor, directed the robodebt program be halted after receiving legal advice in September 2019 that income averaging was unlawful.

Leon later told the royal commission she acted despite the government being “wedded” to the scheme and facing resistance from then Morrison government minister Stuart Robert, who initially vowed to “double down” despite the legal risks. Two weeks after directing the scheme be stopped, Leon was terminated from her role as secretary.

Campbell and Leon were not subject to formal disciplinary penalties by the Australian Public Service Commission because both had left the Australian Public Service before the code of conduct inquiry concluded. Instead, both Campbell and Leon were required to disclose the code of conduct breaches if they decided to seek employment in the APS within the next five years.

The identities of the 10 other current and former public servants who were also found to have breached the code – primarily for failures in judgement, oversight and escalation – were not disclosed.

De Brouwer said he named Campbell and Leon because, as departmental secretaries, they bore ultimate responsibility for robodebt and their conduct raised exceptional public interest concerns. The other 10 officials were not identified because de Brouwer found it was neither fair nor necessary to name them.

Shortly after de Brouwer’s findings were published, Campbell broke her silence in an interview with The Australian newspaper, claiming she had been made a scapegoat for the robodebt scandal. She shifted significant responsibility onto the Department of Social Services, which she said had advised her the scheme was lawful, and said she had made a mistake in trusting DSS.

Wehile acknowledging the harm caused by the unlawful debt-recovery scheme, 

Campbell argued responsibility for legal oversight ultimately sat with other departments and ministers, insisting her department had relied on advice from Social Services.

“The other department had told the government it was lawful. We were told we were fixing it, and so there was no reason to stop.”

Reflecting on her handling of legal concerns, Campbell said she had “prioritised the views of the [DSS] secretary … rather than this person at a legal conference who I didn’t know”, and later added, “I deeply regret not having now gone and got my own advice, because I didn’t realise that theirs was wrong.”

Announcing his resignation as APS commissioner in January, two years before the scheduled end of his five-year term, de Brouwer mounted a strong defence of his handling of the robodebt code of conduct inquiry, describing the investigation as unprecedented in scale and complexity, and arguing that the centralised process he established was rigorous, fair and legally sound.

Despite that defence, de Brouwer’s handling of the inquiry has drawn sustained criticism from serving and former senior public servants and governance experts, particularly over the decision to name only two officials while withholding the identities of the other 10 officials found to have breached the code.

Critics have also challenged the way de Brouwer assessed relative culpability among senior officials, arguing the findings gave insufficient weight to contextual factors, including Leon’s role in ultimately halting the scheme after legal advice confirmed its unlawfulness in 2019.

“The findings about the secretaries involved are also unconvincing, particularly given the failure to mention the context,” wrote former APS commissioner Andrew Podger in a comment piece in The Mandarin after de Brouwer announced his resignation.

“Surely the fact Renée Leon lost her job after finally revealing the scheme’s unlawfulness while Kathryn Campbell was twice given new prestigious appointments after years of actively avoiding consideration of lawfulness (one appointment being after the scheme was finally stopped) was relevant in assessing the relative seriousness of their breaches of the code.”

Podger also questioned whether the inquiry adequately addressed decisions made when robodebt was first presented to cabinet, and whether other senior officials involved at that stage should have faced stronger findings.

The debate has left de Brouwer’s stewardship of the code of conduct inquiry significantly contested.

Nearly three years after Catherine Holmes delivered her judgement on robodebt, the scandal is still working its way through Australia’s accountability machinery, with each process asking a different question: how it happened, who failed, and whether any of those failures crossed the line into corruption.

The NACC now sits at the final and most legally exacting stage of that reckoning.

Its decision will determine whether the oversight body created in response to scandals such as robodebt can deliver the form of accountability Australians believed it was built to provide.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 14, 2026 as "Exclusive: Robodebt Six served NACC findings".