Twelve current and former public servants failed to show care, integrity and due diligence in designing and delivering the unlawful robodebt scheme.

They include former department bosses Kathryn Campbell and Renee Leon, who were named in a report released by the Australian Public Service Commission on Friday.

The officials breached their code of conduct 97 times through their involvement with the welfare debt recovery program, the commission found.

“In their dogged pursuit to deliver on a government priority, some respondents lost their way,” the taskforce report said.

“These public servants lost their objectivity and, in all likelihood, drowned out the deafening and growing criticisms of the scheme to pursue an operational objective.”

The botched robodebt scheme set up by the Coalition government automatically used tax office data to calculate average earnings and issue debt notices between 2015-2019.

It recovered more than $750 million from almost 400,000 people.

But many welfare recipients were falsely accused of owing the government money and the scheme was linked to several suicides.

In 2020, the then Coalition government agreed to pay $1.8 billion in repayments and compensation to settle a class action against the scheme.

Last year, 16 public servants were referred to the public service commissioner for investigation. They included current employees named in the sealed section of the robodebt royal commission’s final report.

Campbell was found to have 12 breaches, including failing to seek legal advice, failing to sufficiently respond to public criticism and whistleblower complaints, failing to inform the responsible minister and creating a culture that prevented the scheme from being scrutinised.

Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer said Campbell also “caused the resumption of income averaging under the scheme in August 2017 when she knew, or ought to have known, that debts raised pursuant to that process were potentially inaccurate”.

He found 13 breaches against Leon, who was secretary from September 2017 to early 2020. They included misrepresenting the department’s legal position on income averaging, failing to correct or qualify that position and failing to “expeditiously” inform the responsible minister of advice on the scheme’s lawfulness.

In a statement on Friday, Leon – now vice-chancellor at Charles Sturt University – defended her role.

“Robodebt was a failed policy developed without proper legal basis that caused enormous pain for some of Australia’s most vulnerable people. I regret the significant human toll of it and am proud to have played a key role in ending robodebt,” she said.

“I’m disappointed with the way the Public Service Commission has come to its decision and stand by the action I took to get advice and bring the program to an end.”

Campbell, who quit the public service last year, is yet to make any comment.

The commission’s report said that four people still working in the public service had been slapped with sanctions ranging from fines and demotions to reprimands. One had their salary reduced.

But there is no framework for punishing a former employee and it is unclear what will happen to those who have retired or resigned.

Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Melissa Donnelly called for further action.

“It is incredibly disappointing that there are no meaningful consequences for those at the top,” she said.

Many of those involved in robodebt claimed they had behaved ethically because they acted in line with rules. But the report said they should have considered whether the program was a “sound and fair” public policy.

“This narrow understanding of the ‘ethical’ value meant that little regard was paid to whether decisions were, in fact, ethical,” the commission’s report read.

For example, the scheme automatically calculated debt by averaging an individual’s income, but this often failed to accurately reflect their earnings and many were ordered to pay more than they owed.

The commission found “little evidence” of any concern or assessment about whether this approach was the right thing to do, particularly when dealing with vulnerable people who may not have the records necessary to disprove their debt notices.

The report found the workplace culture did not foster critical discussion over the robodebt scheme and any criticism was often perceived as delaying progress towards implementing government policy.

This was because the intimidating senior leadership created a culture where employees felt they could not raise risks and issues.

Some higher-ups would also deflect accountability when they had delegated large and unsustainable amounts of work to junior staff.

This would later be used as a justification to explain why the department had not paid enough attention to robodebt’s legal, ethical and operation risks.

No single person was accountable for the scheme, the report said, but the chain reaction of multiple individual failures led to progressive systemic problems.

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-with AAP