Ms Beaumont spent nearly two hours on the phone and was passed onto three different people, who told her they could not verify her identity.

"Apparently Medicare had posted me a new Medicare card, so the [expiry] date on my card… was not the date that they had recorded, so they couldn't progress without me giving them my banking details," she said.

While this part of the story seems fine with me (it's important that security and identity verification is taken seriously, this woman simply overreacted) it's the second half that's disappointing.

After finally getting past the identity hurdles, Ms Beaumont was told no-one in the audit team was available to fix her records because of the "demands on the organisation".

...

"I said to them, 'I will opt out now', and they said, 'Don't do that, because then we can never correct your record and that will remain'."