The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has indicated that its systems are ready for the end-of-financial year rush, despite recent outages affecting its mainframe and delaying its tax return turnaround times.
ATO staff were unable to access tax records for several days last week, crippling efforts to answer end-of-financial year telephone enquiries.
Technical staff at the ATO said the situation was caused by the most recent of a series of maintenance upgrades that began early in June; a maintenance exercise that took its mainframe out of service for two days.
Defending its decision to carry-out the maintenance work at the beginning of its busiest period, the ATO said it updates its systems annually to bring them in line with calendar and legal requirements of the new financial year.
While the ATO maintains that the system maintenance is part of scheduled servicing, it concedes that the some tax agents who use Electronic Lodgement Service (ELS) will have experienced delays over the last month.
According to the ATO's technical staff, the ELS is accepting electronic lodgements but that its back-end systems aren't processing them. The ATO expects its mainframe to start process lodgements tomorrow.
Members of the accounting community are watching the performance of the ATO's electronic services closely this financial year. Last year the ATO was forced to extend the deadline for lodging business activity statements following problems with it Electronic Lodgement System (ELS).
