[Year 12 SofDev] How algorithms make important government decisions — and how that affects you

[Trinh, Samuel HT]

To illustrate how efficient and robust these computers are at making ministerial decision, here is how Centrelink use RoboDebt to collect 300 Million dollars from Australians who received Centrelink payments sometimes in the previous 7 years.  In short, the Social Security Act grants Australian permanent residents an entitlement to receive a Centrelink if you are unemployed, disabled or required to care for young children.  This payment is means tested and any income you earn above a specify threshold while receiving the payment will reduce your payment progressively until no payment is made at the upper limit.  You report your income on a fortnightly basis and payment made to you is based on the income report for that period.  This is the law, this is how it is supposed to work.  Your entitlement for payment for that period is based on your income for the same period, and the period is a fortnight.

How here is how roboDebt works, quite ingenious actuall, not even the minister in flesh and blood can match it,
Robodebt attempts to matches the income you report to Centrelink with income reported from your tax return.  This is where it encounter a runtime error, with a type mismatch.  Centrelink reported income is fortnightly figure, tax office record is annual figure.  It’s just not the same, we type mismatch, conversion error and severe logical error.  On TRYING and CATCHING this EXCEPTION, robodebt does not crash, but resolves the conflict quite gracely, By converting annual income to fortnightly income by dividing by 26 and apportion the amount evenly across the entirely financial year irrespective of when you worked during the year.  This is where Robodebt must have fail year 12 SD because Effectiveness and Accuracy of the solution is out the window assuming robodebt ran under Windows, however we must all praise its efficiency.  The resulting effect of this exception handling is, if you receive payment in the first half of the financial year and did not work while you received your payment, then work in the 2nd half of the financial year, Robodebt averages your income across the entire year, resulting in an overpayment despite the fact that you never worked a day while receiving payments.  Robodebt has effectively re-written the social security Act turning what is an entitlement to a loan that has to be paid back when you show some income in your tax return in the process raising 300 million dollars when executed.  Here is the few lines of code for that conversions, perhaps give them to your students to practise in spotting the error

‘ Array 0..25 represents 26 fortnightly periods in the financial year
TRY –
Compare fortnightly reported income With Tax-return Annual Income

CATCH
Exception – Annual Tax-return data cannot be compared with fortnightly periods

Fortnightly income = annual income / 26

For count = 0 to 25
DEEMED INCOME [count] = fortnightly income
Next count

For count = 0 to 25
IF DEEMED INCOME [count] > Reported Income[count]
   DEBT = DEBT + ACTUAL PAYMENT[count]
   FRAUD ALERT
   NOTIFY ROBOProsecutor
Next count

Finally ISSUE DEBT Notice to Client


Australian law explicitly allows computers to make important decisions previously made by the ministers or staff of at least 11 federal government departments.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-21/algorithms-can-make-decisions-on-behalf-of-federal-ministers/8704858


Hmmm. Would I rather have a politician or an algorithm running the country... ?

Senator Deep Blue: I have an SQL query for Prime Minister Watson.
PM Watson: You 32-bit buffoon. /dev/null

Yep. I'll take the algorithms every time.


--

Mark Kelly

mark at vceit.com<mailto:mark at vceit.com>
http://vceit.com

Powered by algorithms.




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