However,Minister for Superannuation and Women’s Economic Safety Jane Hume says the Australian Taxation Office,which ran the program,“is not aware of any people accessing the early release scheme under coercion”.

She said the tax office considered compliance and fraud risks for a broad range of scenarios,including how to support victims of financial abuse.

“The ATO also assessed a number of risk factors to identify applications that were potentially not made by the individual. The ATO flagged these applications with super funds,allowing them to undertake further checks prior to any payments,” she said.

“Early release was a lifeline for millions of Australians when they needed financial certainty the most.”

The Financial Rights Legal Centre’s casework director Alexandra Kelly described the scheme as “frictionless” because it was easy to access and applications could be made online.

“You can have someone who has been pushed and forced and there’s no one there that was seeing that,and they can access it relatively easily and quickly. It’s hard to then unwind,” she said.

“A client I had looked at whether or not there would be phone records because she had been yelled at whilst it was happening,but even that is difficult to establish.”

Mel Birks,AIST’s general manager of advocacy,said superannuation had not historically been a target of financial abuse because it was locked away until retirement – unlikebank loans orCentrelink benefits – but the early release scheme “opened the doors to that sort of abusive behaviour”.

She described the situation as a “perfect storm” that would affect women throughout their lives.

Women already have less superannuation than men because of salary gaps and time out of the workforce caring for children,and those in abusive relationships or who are victims of coercive control are likely to have less again.

“It’s putting them back really to where their grandmothers were,which is having no superannuation in your 30s essentially and potentially to your 40s. I think that’s a really concerning outcome,” Ms Birks said.

Ms Glenn said the next national plan to reduce violence against women and children now being developed by the government offered an opportunity to review systems such as access to superannuation.

Labor’s superannuation spokesman Stephen Jones acknowledged the early release scheme was “a one-off event where you’re dealing with literally hundreds of thousands of applications in a week” but said the guidelines appeared to prioritise speed over safety.

“On an ongoing basis,we need to ensure that there are fail-safe mechanisms and checks in place so that women aren’t coerced by a violent partner into handing over their life savings,” he said.

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