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Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has told Sky News the exact explanation for the $60 billion JobKeeper miscalculation and said it was of course “regrettable but it didn’t lead to any hit to the taxpayer”.

On Friday a significant reporting error had led Treasury to dramatically revise its projections for the Morrison government's JobKeeper program.

As a result, Treasury's revised estimate of the cost of the JobKeeper program is now just $70 billion, which is $60 billion less than forecast.

The treasurer said the revision in the forecast about the amount of people in JobKeeper means “we will have to raise $60 billion less in debt than we otherwise would have had to” which would have been on top of the existing $650 billion foreign debt Australia has accrued.

Mr Frydenberg said the reason treasury forecast the number of JobKeeper to be 6.6 million people rather than 3.5 million was because at the height of the virus in Australia “they thought we were going to have a lock down like we’ve seen in Europe, an eight week lockdown of really tough health restrictions”.

He also pointed to the form released by the tax office for businesses to enroll to the program which asked how many employees would be eligible for JobKeeper.

Around a thousand of those business “incorrectly filled in the form” and entered how much money their business should be entitled to rather than the amount of employees.

“The ATO collected that data, even though it was incorrectly submitted and then came up with the number of 6.5 milllion, passed it on to government, and we repeated it”.