Finance reporter Alexis Carey explains who the ATO is targeting this year, what changes are coming on July 1st, and how to avoid getting caught out by the tax man.

The Department of Human Services has apologised after “technical difficulties” brought down the myGov online portal and mobile apps for most of Friday.

The issues with the website, which millions of Australians must now use to access their employer payment summaries in order to file their tax returns, started at around 9:40am AEST, sparking a flood of complaints.

myGov, which brings together government services including the ATO, Centrelink, Medicare and child support into one place, was launched in May 2013 but many Australians will only now be activating their account.

Due to the rollout of Single Touch Payroll, many employees are not receiving a payment summary — previously known as a group certificate — for the first time. Instead they must register for myGov, and from there myATO, to access their information.

Some of our services (incl. the portals & our online services via myGov) are currently unavailable or experiencing slowness. We're working on the issue & apologise for the inconvenience. Stay tuned for updates. pic.twitter.com/oTQNDfC6WP — ato.gov.au (@ato_gov_au) July 12, 2019

Hi Felipe, there are currently some technical difficulties, including some people not being able to access myGov. We apologise for any inconvenience. We are urgently investigating the issue and we’re working hard to fix this as quickly as possible. — myGov (@myGovau) July 12, 2019

Services “began being progressively restored” from 12:30pm and were back online just after 4pm, according to Human Services. The Department said that if anyone believed they had been disadvantaged by the outage, they could call their regular payment line to discuss their situation with a staff member.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this outage undoubtedly caused for our customers. We understand the timing is unfortunate,” Department of Human Services general manager Hank Jongen said in a statement.

“We want to make sure customers are not disadvantaged by these issues, so we have extended the deadline for people to report their income until 7:30pm AEST.

“Our staff worked hard to rectify the problem as quickly as possible. All services are now available, however a small amount of people may still experience intermittent issues logging in as we return to full capacity.

“If people don’t have urgent business, we encourage them to wait until services are fully restored to allow those with urgent business to access the services they need.

“An investigation is underway to determine what caused the outage, but we have already ruled out any possibility of a cyber-attack. We can also confirm all regular payments were made overnight and were not impacted by this disruption.”

It comes after the union representing tax office workers warned the changes, combined with the government’s just-legislated income tax cuts, were leading to unprecedented call volumes and crippling operations.

frank.chung@news.com.au