Administrative burdens, behavioural insights and economic dignity: the case of Robodebt

Abstract

This paper uses the concepts of administrative burden and economic dignity to understand the harms imposed on welfare recipients from the application of behavioural insights in the initial correspondence they received in the Robodebt scheme. A core principle of Robodebt was the shifting of the burden of compliance from state to citizen, with correspondence requiring citizens to ‘prove’ their income from years past or face a debt. This was coupled with significant challenges for recipients in being able to talk to the government directly about the notice they received. Based upon this, recipients have recounted feeling like criminals, and were actively described as such in the media and by Ministers. Moves towards ‘self-service’ or automated forms of compliance like in the case of Robodebt are typically justified in terms of cost savings and efficiency. However, without serious consideration of the potential negative impacts on citizens, they risk the production of significant harm.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.