TURNBULL GOVERNMENT MISSING EXPLANATIONS FOR ATO TECH FAILURES

For nearly a year, the Turnbull Government has been unable - or refused to - explain to the Australian people why the ATO’s website continually crashes, preventing people from accessing vital information or lodging returns.

 

This silence has come in the face of warnings from tax practitioners that the conduct of the 2017 Tax Time could be affected by the website outages.

 

The Opposition has repeatedly called for the Turnbull Government to come clean on what is happening with this important platform.Navigating the tax system can be frustrating enough without repeated outages and Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t appear to be interested in reassuring the public at all. 

 

Back in April we also urged the Government to hold an independent review into the way digital transformation was being managed, to determine what could be done to prevent repeated digital service failures. The Turnbull Government has ignored this call as well.

 

We also like to see the release, in full, of the final PricewaterhouseCoopers and CTO Group report into ATO systems.

 

This is at least the fourth ATO outage in the last eight months – tax practitioners and other people reliant on these systems are right to be asking questions about when this will be resolved.

 

The Turnbull Government has been missing in action since last December when the website crashed for days and through the failures since. They haven’t explained why the ATO site keeps crashing, what they’ve done to fix the problem and how they’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.

 

It isn’t good enough to leave the ATO Commissioner to make public statements. The buck stops with Turnbull Government ministers, who need to assure the Australian people their tax information is safe and that system repairs will be made.

 

The Turnbull Government has failed in many aspects of digital transformation:

[if !supportLists]·         [endif]NAPLAN Online failed.

[if !supportLists]·         [endif]The Census failure

[if !supportLists]·         [endif]The robo-debt debacle

[if !supportLists]·         [endif]Overdue and over budget Child Support ICT upgrades

[if !supportLists]·         [endif]Failure to reduce the 1500-plus government websites into one

 

The common theme across all of these government tech failures is lack of transparency. Turnbull Government has not adequately explained to the Australian people exactly what has gone wrong with so many of their government services.

 

Labor believes the ATO should be given sufficient resources to keep its system online – something which they struggle to do, thanks to the Turnbull Government slashing 3000 jobs.

 

With yet another ATO outage affecting Australians and tax professionals during tax time its past time the Turnbull Government fronted up to the public and explained how they will fix it.