news, latest-news

The Australian Taxation Office's website and internal systems crashed again on Thursday and remained offline for several hours, with this year's tax time just nine days away. The agency's technicians restored the main site by 2pm but the picture on what was happening internally was less clear. The crash, the latest in a series of serious technical failures at the agency, comes just nine days before the beginning of tax time, its busiest period of the year. The Institute of Public Accountants, whose members rely on the ATO's web portals to do their work every day, said one firm had to send its staff home on Thursday because they were "sitting idle" during the outtage. The Tax Office itself did not supply details of exactly what went wrong, referring inquiries to the updates on its website. The ATO suffered an unprecedented crash of internal storage networks on December 11 and 12, 2016 and February 2 this year, causing much of the agency's work to slow to a halt and scores of staff to be sent home. Commissioner of Chris Jordan assured Senate Estimates in May that storage systems had been rebuilt to "to the latest in world-class standards", and the Tax office was reviewing our IT framework to ensure stability and resilience more generally. Mr Jordan offered assurances that that systems had been restored, no taxpayer data was been lost and and the ATO was "tracking well" for delivery of tax time 2017. Thursday's crash is not thought to be related to the problems seen in December and February. Fairfax has been told that public servants whose work relies on online systems are unable to perform their duties on Thursday morning and voting in the ATO's key enterprise bargaining vote was also disrupted. Institute of Public Accountants senior tax advisor Tony Greco said it was still unclear what exactly happened on Thursday, but that some of his organization's members were unhappy. "We've already had quite a number of calls from members, not very happy, this is a continuation of not being able to do their work and we understand their frustration," Mr Greco said. "It's not isolated, it's a series of events that goes over years. "We've had one member call us today and tell us that he's effectively had to send his staff home because you can't just have them sitting there idle. "We don't want to jump too early, but the ongoing impacts are real and our clients are suffering productivity and reputational damage." But Mr Greco said he did not fear a repeat of December's disaster which he said was caused by a very rare failure of a piece of hardware which was unlikely to be repeated. Labor's digital economy spokesman Ed Husic was also calling for more information on Thursday, saying accountants and other tax practitioners needed answers. "Accountants have been left in the dark as to what's gone on and have been concerned about the impact that these shutdowns have had on their business," Mr Husic said.

https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/1e3505f9-0362-4fb9-8211-25662f974df9/r349_0_930_328_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg