From ABC (Australia) news a month or so ago:
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has admitted to the ABC that more than half a billion dollars has been claimed over the past two years by fraudsters exploiting a glaring security gap in the agency’s identity checking system.
ABC News
It’s interesting to think about this in light of the shame of Australia’s Robotdebt scheme (which started out attempting to stop fraud, but ended up perpetuating one of the cruelest Government schemes in history, resulting in innocent people committing suicide).
One one hand the half a billion dollars the ATO has lost is infuriating. One the other, I wonder if there is a case to be made that misappropriating $0.5B out of a total tax revenue of $689B is an acceptable cost to avoid sweeping up innocent taxpayers in a mire of anti-fraud procedures.
