Labor has called for the Inspector General of Taxation to review the repeated systems outages at the Australian Taxation Office, saying it is not good enough that the ATO’s systems keep shutting down.
The shadow assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh, said it was time for an independent review of the ATO after its online services were taken offline for more than five hours on Wednesday, during peak tax return time.
The ATO suffered yet another outage on Wednesday, the latest in a string of outages to have hit the organisation in recent months.
It affected services including the Tax Agent, Business and BAS Agent Portals, Standard Business Reporting, and Australian Business Register.
The ATO has launched an investigation into the incident, with acting chief operating officer Frances Cawthra telling the ABC it was the first time such an incident had occurred.
“We’ll do what we call a post-incident review, which is to understand where the root cause of this particular issue was so we can ensure it doesn’t happen again,” she said on Thursday.
But Leigh said there had been too many systems outages in recent years, and called for an independent review of the ATO.
“In December, the government oversaw a three-day ATO blackout, and another just as long in February, now taxpayers and agents are confronted with a jittery system at peak lodgment time,” Leigh said.
“The government does not appear to be interested in reassuring the public that the intermittent outages will be resolved and reviewed.
Leigh said the government had cut over 3,000 jobs at the ATO at a time when the agency was struggling.
Ali Noroozi, the inspector general of taxation, has already agreed to a separate review of the ATO after one of its highest-ranking officers, Michael Cranston, was charged with alleged abuse of public office earlier this year.
Noroozi last week agreed to review the ATO’s internal controls against the risk of fraud following the multimillion-dollar tax fraud case – revealed in May – which led to the arrest of Cranston’s son and daughter, Adam and Lauren, who were allegedly part of a tax-fraud syndicate.
Chris Jordan, the ATO commissioner, admitted this week that ATO’s IT failures and the fraud investigation have had a negative impact on the ATO’s standing in the community.
“I understand only too well that we have ground to make up,” he said.
In February, after the ATO suffered a related services issue, Noroozi told senators during an estimates hearing that he was closely watching the ATO.
“I think it would be premature for me to launch an extensive review at this time,” Noorozi said at the time.
“If, for example, come tax time and there was a failure, that would be a definite indicator that there have been a number of reviews and there are still problems, and that maybe I should do a detailed review of what has gone on … we are watching that space.”
