This is the best summary I could come up with:

“The question is whether it’s good tax administration if someone will be made homeless if they don’t receive the refund they were counting on because they need it to pay their rent,” Payne told Guardian Australia.

Dubbed robotax, the initiative has drawn comparison to the flawed robodebt compliance program, which used automated processes to assert that welfare recipients owed money to the commonwealth.

The tax office said in a statement that according to a review and separate legal advice, it had no choice other than to extract the old debts from refunds even though they had previously been set aside, sometimes for many years.

Guardian Australia has spoken to dozens of people affected by the campaign, including those who were already under financial stress when they learned of the outstanding amounts.

She described a mass ATO mail-out advising people of the old debts as having “poor judgment”, in part because of the lack of detail provided in the communication.

Payne said the onus was now on the tax office to start resolving the growing number of complaints triggered by the on-hold debt campaign.

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