The Australian tax office website and systems are again experiencing “intermittent failures”, this time during a critical period for tax agents.
The ATO issued an alert on Thursday morning, saying it was again investigating failures with its systems. Its website and other ATO systems were down in the morning, although were progressively being restored by 2pm.
“We are aware some of our systems are intermittently unavailable, including ato.gov.au,” the agency said. “This may affect the ability for some users to access a number of ATO systems.”
The ATO apologised for any inconvenience but offered no initial explanation for the faults. The system failure comes less than two weeks from tax time.
It is at least the third time since December that the ATO’s systems have experienced major failures. Outages in December and February were blamed on new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise storage systems and their primary backups.
The repeated failure of ATO systems has caused significant disruption and frustration for tax agents, who heavily rely on its online portals.
The Institute of Public Accountants, a peak industry body for small to medium businesses, has again expressed concern at the ATO faults.
Spokesman Wayne Debernardi said the IPA appreciated the tax office efforts to investigate the previous HPE faults, but said it did not appear to have translated into better outcomes for its members.
He said the outages were costing accountants in lost productivity at a crucial time of the financial year.
“I’ve just had some intel back from our members, and the outages are impacting them, which means they are impacting clients too,” he said. “We all want to work with the ATO on a digital solution to this, but this is now starting to impact on people’s livelihoods.”
Following the last failure in February, accounting partner at Thomson Geer and Tax Institute president Arthur Athanasiou called for heads to roll. He said the recurrent faults were unacceptable and should have been resolved permanently.
“It’s just not good enough and, no matter how many people you get in as consultants to identify the problem and identify fixes, it should have all occurred by now,” Athanasiou said.
A report released by the ATO earlier this month blamed the outages on HPE’s storage systems and their configurations but found its own business continuity mechanisms, communications and engagement “worked well”.
The ATO identified five areas for improvement and said it was considering further measures to prevent disruption to its key stakeholders.
“We are mindful of the disruption that the outages caused the community and our key stakeholders – practitioners, the superannuation industry and digital service providers – and are considering what further measures we can put in place to minimise the risk of the ATO and the community being exposed to this type of incident in the future,” the ATO said earlier this month.
