Let me provide some background information for people who aren't familiar with the agencies involved in this (Centrelink, Medicare, and the Australian Taxation Office).<p>These places have some of the worst-run IT departments <i>on the planet</i>. I can say this with more than a little evidence. As a consultant, I've worked on over a hundred customer sites, all the way from tiny private companies up to federal government, including all three of those agencies. I've seen how IT is done at just about every state government office in my state, and two dozen in other states.<p>There just is no comparison. Centrelink especially is so fucked up that people think that I made up my stories about my experience there. It's crazy beyond belief.<p>The sheer scale of it is amazing. They have over 1K IT staff in one building, and spent $2B on a single software upgrade project! They have huge teams for obscure tasks that other large enterprises might have just one or two people doing. There are Big Name consultants everywhere. Direct vendor support, often flown in from the US, which is otherwise rare around here.<p>Despite all these people, money, and support, nothing works. Nothing. It's all broken. Everything. Every part. It's a sight to behold.<p>I wrote a report for them about a key security system where I pointed out that out of something like 50 settings, <i>47 were incorrectly configured</i>. The only reason it "worked" is because the errors <i>cancelled out</i>. That is, it was incorrectly rejecting valid access, but another error meant that the rejection was being ignored. And so on.<p>Similarly, their core authentication system was supposed to be distributed and highly available, but the <i>main architect</i> put all of the servers into one rack, one on top of another. He said with a straight face that a product that is <i>well known in the industry</i> for its efficient wide-scale replication is "bad at replication" and only works if the "network cables are really short". He meant 30cm, not 3000km. A power outage took out all three "redundant" controllers, and so something like 80K staff spent several days staring at login prompts on their monitors for a few days.<p>I could go on, and on, and on. I have a whole collection of stories like that.<p>The most amazing part is that I was only there for <i>a couple of months</i>, yet this short time period yielded 8 of my top 10 horror stories from the field.<p>It's also the only workplace setting where I had ever seen a man cry. For work related reasons. Several men, on several occasions.