Small accountancy businesses have demanded compensation from the tax office, after yet another embarrassing failure of its online systems.
The Australian Taxation Office was again forced to take its online services offline for about five hours on Wednesday, just two weeks since the last round of intermittent failures.
It followed major disruptions in December and February, which were caused by faulty 3PAR storage area network systems provided by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
The Institute of Public Accountants, a peak industry body for small to medium businesses, has now ramped up its criticisms of the ATO. The institute has demanded that its members be given a share of the compensation HPE paid this year to the ATO.
A spokesman, Wayne Debernardi, described the outages as a “blight” on the agency.
“We recognise the ATO is doing everything they possibly can to rectify the situation,” Debernardi told Guardian Australia. “We also understand that they’ve received compensation through their service provider, HPE, and we still believe our members, who are in the main small businesses, should also share in their compensation – it’s as simple as that.
“At the end of the day, another outage from the ATO is unacceptable.”
Wednesday’s outages impacted individuals, accountants and other businesses relying on the ATO’s online tools, portals and website at one of the busiest times of the year.
Such failures tend to disproportionately hurt smaller firms specialising in tax, which are reliant on the ATO’s tools and are often unable to redeploy staff to other duties.
The ATO said Wednesday’s outages were not the result of a denial of service attack and no data had been lost or compromised. The failure was also not linked to the HPE hardware failures this year. The agency has apologised for the inconvenience.
The ATO’s acting chief operations officer, Frances Cawthra, conceded the repeated outages would hurt confidence in the agency. But Cawthra said the problems would have been worse had the ATO not taken its systems offline.
“It’s very unfortunate and we of course understand that the community will be very upset and angry about the fact that the systems had to be brought down again,” Cawthra told the ABC’s AM program on Thursday. “That will go to our reputation, we understand that.”
Debernardi said it was too early to fully assess the impact of Wednesday’s outages on his members. But he said past outages had caused lost productivity and lost revenue. In some cases, staff were sent home or forced to sit idle for long periods.
“It’s a blight, to be honest, that the ATO is still suffering from technical issues,” he said. “Now, Chris Jordan, when he came in as commissioner, was going to be driving this tech change. That obviously hasn’t happened.”
The ATO is conducting “a post-incident review” of the latest failure.
