In May, Kurt Miller lined up a three-month fly-in fly-out work contract and asked his employment service provider, atWork Australia, for support getting to the airport in Perth, almost three hours from his home in the state’s wheat belt.

“I’d already used my own money for the interview, for the medical, for the drug and alcohol test. I used my own funds but I needed help getting to the airport,” the 45-year-old tells The Saturday Paper.

“So I spent three days ringing them trying to ask for fuel assistance and it takes them days to ring back or they don’t ring back at all.”

Miller, who lives half an hour outside Wongan Hills, north-east of Perth, has no mobile phone reception at his home and has been in desperate financial circumstances since January, when a week-long power blackout set off a chain reaction of financial shocks from which he is yet to recover.

The job he’d found in May was supposed to be the way out.

He travelled into town for a scheduled phone appointment with atWork Australia in late May, a day before he was due to fly out for work, and begged for fuel vouchers so he could start the job. Workforce Australia providers have access to an Employment Fund, which paid out $150 million for training and wage subsidies last year but is also supposed to be “flexibly” used to help people looking for work remove ordinary barriers that get in the way.

For people living on below-poverty-rate welfare payments, these can be things such as fuel, phones, clothes for work, licences or any number of other necessities that cost money, the one thing they do not have. To the year ending June 30, the same Employment Fund paid out $8 million to people for “communications and technology” and almost $28 million for transport costs.

But not for Miller.

Nobody was available to help him on his 2pm phone call with the atWork team and so he waited in town until almost 5pm on the promise of a call back that never came. Instead, he phoned the FIFO employer and told them he wouldn’t be able to start.

“Mate, I don’t want to be unemployed. I can’t afford to be unemployed,” Miller tells The Saturday Paper.

“I like nice things. They haven’t helped me with anything but they’ve hindered every job opportunity I’ve ever had.”

Miller has been in and out of work for the past two years on account of injury or being too broke to make it to appointments.

“When I was back on Centrelink for six weeks after I blew out my knee, they didn’t offer to help with the transport to get to Perth for the medical clearance so I could return to work,” he says.

There are few work opportunities in Wongan Hills or the surrounding area and, in any case, Miller crashed his last vehicle trying to avoid kangaroos on regional roads. He’s replaced that with what he could afford – an old postie bike – and has been left with no option but to cart jerry cans of fuel around on the back of it when travelling long distances because of where he lives.

When they have come through with fuel assistance, atWork arranges this over the phone. They have to call the business directly to make the fuel payment. However, there is only one service station in town where this can be done at 5am – the time Miller needs to leave to get to Perth. This wouldn’t be an issue if his provider responded to his support requests when he made them, Miller says, but they do not. Thus, the jerry cans on the way to Perth to make medical and other job appointments.

Miller’s story is threaded with the maddening consequences of missed opportunity familiar to anybody who has struggled to make ends meet.

While the federal government has made some lukewarm gestures at reform of the employment services system, the likelihood of substantial change to a system a quarter of a century old is uncertain. This latest iteration was set in place by the Coalition, but outsourced job agencies have ruled through successive governments since the Howard era.

There have been some concessions that the model simply does not work.

At a cost of millions, the Department of Employment has essentially taken over the Broome Employment Services region by embedding federal public servants with a single local provider, Job Pathways, to “improve coordination across complex program and service landscapes, streamlining pathways for people to address employment barriers and gain secure well-paid jobs”.

In Kurt Miller’s employment service region, there are two Workforce Australia providers: atWork Australia Moora and atWork Australia Northam.

The fantasy of choice here mirrors the diminished ability Miller has to take control of his own affairs. Under the pretence of support, his provider arrives too late or with not enough and the consequences are dire.

“I just don’t have the freedom to make choices for myself,” he says. “And this has got nothing to do with [my case manager] who is a real people person and tries her hardest, but she’s not allowed to make any decisions, and it’s the people above her who are just running a business.”

atWork Australia has five directors. With one exception, all of them live about as far from Kurt Miller as it is possible to get: 18,000 kilometres away in Sarasota, Florida.

The company that ultimately owns atWork, via MedHealth in Australia, is a medical assessments and insurance firm called ExamWorks, which is itself owned by a private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners, via a holding company registered in the domestic US tax haven of Delaware.

ExamWorks is led by co-executive chairmen Richard Perlman and James Price, and co-chief executive and chief financial officer J. Miguel Fernandez de Castro. All are directors of atWork Australia and all three honed their corporate skills running a commercial kitchen food manufacturer called TurboChef Technologies Inc.

Perlman has also been involved in home furnishings, car parts and real estate, while another executive, Wesley Campbell, who also serves as an atWork Australia director, has expertise in the medical and dental technology industries.

None of the Australian entities controlled by ExamWorks have filed financial returns to the corporate regulator since 2017. When atWork Australia won a Workforce Australia contract for the new system, the deal was worth $226 million over several years, making it the third-largest provider by funding total in the country.

Those contract values do not include credit providers able to claim from the Employment Fund to support people like Kurt Miller.

What does a multinational medical assessments conglomerate founded by kitchen appliance kings know about the finicky business of supporting human beings into work? Probably not a great deal, people being significantly more complicated than kitchen ovens.

Last month, while “thrashing” his postie bike running to and from appointments across the Western Australian wheat belt and into Perth, Miller blew the engine five minutes outside of Wongan Hills.

This was a setback on its own but five days earlier Miller had been talking to another employer about yet another FIFO gig and asked atWork Australia if it could help him out with phone credit, which it assured him it could do.

There, on the side of the road, he was unable to call for help or roadside service because atWork had not yet delivered on the promise made almost a week before.

“I couldn’t go into town anymore because I didn’t have transport so I hitchhiked home,” he says.

“Then, after that, they left me stranded for five days before they organised a taxi so I could get to my doctors’ appointments in Perth.”

Even this was unwieldy. atWork offered to send a taxi to take Miller to his bike but he lives in a “no service guarantee” area for roadside assistance and could not book a job until he was physically at the bike, where he faced a wait of up to 12 hours.

Instead, Miller decided to use the taxi to get to a hire car outlet where he paid to rent a car out of his own pocket, with money he really couldn’t spare, so he could actually make it to his pre-employment checks and his psychologist.

atWork said it couldn’t reimburse him for the car despite it costing less than multiple taxis over the coming days to achieve the same result. Now, following questions submitted by The Saturday Paper, Miller has been told a number of his previously denied requests for reimbursement will be processed and that atWork will look at covering the hire car as well.

“I keep saying it’s like being in a financially abusive relationship,” Miller says.

“Every time you ask for support it’s up to the discretion of the operator, the person you’re talking to, as to whether you can get it or not. Or, if they try, there are ‘policies and procedures’ they say prevent them from helping.

“But when I start a new job, I’m given a copy of all the policies and procedures. I’ve never seen these ones. I can’t log in and see what the job provider is doing or to check if they are doing what they say they will.”

When Miller complained to the Department of Employment about the topsy-turvy nature of his relationship with atWork Australia, the department attempted to place him in the self-managed stream of Workforce Australia online and suspended his mutual obligations. According to Miller, however, he actually wanted his provider to help. Because of a mental illness for which he is assessed as needing support through the same employment services system, he is ineligible for the light-touch online stream.

atWork Australia did not respond to the questions put by The Saturday Paper but a spokesperson for the Department of Employment said: “Workforce Australia providers are expected to be flexible when scheduling provider appointments and must take a participant’s personal circumstances into consideration when scheduling and conducting appointments.

“Providers should conduct the appointment at the scheduled time,” the spokesperson said.

“Where unforeseen circumstances mean that the provider can’t conduct the appointment at the scheduled time, they should advise the participants before the appointment and, where appropriate, reschedule the appointment for a time convenient to the participant.”

The department advises people to lodge complaints via its National Customer Service Line, but Miller’s was resolved with “no further action” to be taken.

“Providers, although contracted by the Department, are independent businesses with their own procedures that coincide with the Workforce Australia Guidelines,” a representative told him when the complaint was closed.

“The NCSL’s role when a formal complaint is referred to a provider, is not to investigate the complaint, but to facilitate a conversation between the complainant and the provider.”

atWork Australia holds a separate contract to run the apparently independent complaints line for disability employment services but those clients can’t complain about atWork and are sent to the same place as Miller – back to the department.

“The department is aware of a business relationship between atWork and the CRRS [Complaints Resolution and Referral Service], and as such, the CRRS is unable to take complaints about atWork,” an official told a representative of the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union. “This avoids any real or perceived conflicts of interest.”

Miller’s complaint, like all others to the department line, is referred back to the provider in the first instance. It’s a tangled web.

“I just want to work,” he says. “This job is meant to be starting next week and I’ve been running around trying to get out of this mess. I wanted to call them to confirm I would be able to start but haven’t done that because I couldn’t be sure that I could without being able to get to Perth.”

Everywhere Miller turns, there is an employment provider that seeks to “manage every part of my life” only to end up mismanaging it.

Senator Murray Watt became the new minister for employment on Monday, after a cabinet reshuffle.