Government stats show hundreds of thousands of businesses increased their turnover while receiving JobKeeper payments last year. 

Around one million businesses and not-for-profits signed up for the JobKeeper subsidy last year, which required them to show or predict a significant downturn in profits to be eligible. 

The independent Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) says that 157,650 employers actually had their turnover rise during that period, compared to the same time in 2019, allowing them to accrue $4.6 billion in taxpayer-funded wage subsidies.

For more than 365,000 employers, real-world turnover stayed above the thresholds for the April to June period last year, during which time they accrued about $12.5 billion dollars in JobKeeper payments.

“It is morally outrageous that they were willing to let this extent of taxpayer waste go on, without shutting it down,” says Federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh, who obtained the figures from the PBO. 

Dr Leigh said the government had access to the turnover data when the scheme was ongoing.

“They saw the figures in real time, they had the numbers in front of them in a way in which we can only now, a year later, see what was going on,” he said.

“The Morrison government needs to be asking these firms to repay.”

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has rejected calls for mandatory JobKeeper paybacks.

“Companies that have the ability to do, should do it,” he said earlier this year. 

“[But] that was never the legislated purpose of the program.

“The purpose of the program was designed to stem that tide of hundreds of thousands of our fellow Australians lining up outside Centrelink. 

“And it was to end that fear we saw across the community at the height of the pandemic.”