ATO services drop out and what this means for you

The ATO’s services drop out at the end of last year has caused a major ongoing headache for both businesses and their accountants.

Businesses have been impacted in the following ways:

Intermittent outages to the Business Portal and Tax Agents Portal
Delays in processing
Delays in issuing refunds. The ATO claim they are fast-tracking refunds where they can

The government organisation has been working to restore their systems and has seen continued progress. Their core services are stable and more systems are being brought back online.

But last Thursday morning the portal services were hit again, due to what the ATO says are issues “relating to the hardware faults that occurred in December”.

We have spoken to the ATO today who has said they are able to help with basic things like updating addresses, account balances, etc. – but anything more complex they don’t yet have up and running (e.g. registering for GST).

They should hopefully have this working by some stage today but it could be as late as Wednesday.

All personal data is safe as the failure was due to a hardware issue, not a cyber attack. Businesses should expect further disruption due to restoration and maintenance but things are progressing.

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