The mystery solved

I never posted a follow up to my previous post about Centrelink. I was told by the person I spoke to at Centrelink there would be someone contacting me by phone within three business days. Of course this didn’t happen and I called them two weeks later to find out what was happening. I don’t actually know whether there was any follow up before my call. Anyway, I had to wait over ten minutes to get through to a person and then I explained the whole situation again. This person then transferred me to someone in a different department. The wait for that person was even longer, probably fifteen minutes or more. When the next person came on the line, she started asking me to repeat everything again and I was already fed up. I queried whether she had actually looked at my account or not. To be honest I am surprised I didn’t have to provide account details again.  She replied that she was waiting for information to come up. My thought was that she could have at least mentioned that instead of expecting me just follow along.

This woman did figure out what the problem was after putting me on hold a few times. She did apologise for that and she was extremely helpful from that point. It seems that when we went to Canada fourteen years ago, Game Fanatic was coded as having left Australia permanently. This didn’t happen to any of the rest of us but just GF. This may explain why it took three goes or more to get our family payments restarted when we got back. But it doesn’t explain why this didn’t get caught for thirteen years or more. Sigh.. The rep then spent a long time trying to fix the problem but her computer was giving her a lot of issues. Eventually she promised to get it resolved by the next day and phone back. Famous last words from customer service…but I did get a call the next day and it was resolved. I even got a letter confirming we didn’t owe any money about a week or so later.

It still boggles my mind this was sitting there all these years and it took some little niggle from a tax office notice to flag it.