‘Unfortunate’ casualties to ATO digital crash continue

Late last year, the ATO said a new service, ATO Online, would be available in the first-half of 2017 as a new platform capable of replicating the functions of the Tax Agent Portal.

However, after the massive and ongoing failures of the ATO’s online portals since December last year, this rollout has been put on hold.

The ATO has yet to confirm when the new systems will be available.

“Improvements to digital services are on hold until we have stabilised the performance of our systems for Tax Time 2017 to match the service and experience of last year. Tax agents can continue to engage with us via PLS, the existing Tax Agent Portal, and ELS,” an ATO spokesperson told Accountants Daily.

Tony Greco of The Institute of Public Accountants, who has long been advocating for the stability of the ATO’s digital systems for accountants, said this is an unfortunate aspect of the ongoing outages.

“All IT projects under development to improve tax practitioner services are on hold, and maintaining stability of the current systems is priority one, two and three,” he said.

Mr Greco previously told Accountants Daily that the IPA continues to push the government to honour its commitment to dedicating resources to the stability of online systems for the accounting industry.