ATO income tax system upgrade set to go ahead
- 11 January, 2010 11:54
- Comments 6
The Australian Tax Office's (ATO) technical deployment of the nation's new income tax IT system looks set to go ahead as scheduled from Friday January 22.
The upgrade has been described by the ATO's second commissioner David Butler, as the biggest in the agency's history and will turn off the national tax payer system that has been used since the early 1970s, the National Taxpayer System (NTS).
In its place will be a new income tax processing system that extends the ATO's "integrated core processing (ICP) system to income tax and higher education loan accounts (HELA)".
The ATO has been advising taxpayers and tax practitioners to lodge income tax returns early as several systems will be offline between January 22nd and the 27th.
In late December, the ATO said it would only proceed with the upgrade if it was confident it is ready.
"There are some areas to focus on before we implement the new system. We will carefully track our progress between now and the end of January. We will only implement the new system when we are confident it is ready," a statement on the ATO website reads.
"The final decision will not be taken on this until the end of January 2010. If we are not confident of a successful deployment we will defer the new system until we are sure it can be implemented with less disruption."
However, an ATO spokesperson has told Computerworld there have been no changes to the existing schedule, indicating the upgrade would proceed as planned.
The upgrade is part of the agency's broader Change Program, which aims to migrate it away from more than 180 legacy and paper-based systems to a single, integrated core IT system.
The program has, however, been hit by delays and budget blowouts while forcing the agency to publicly acknowledge it was under "extraordinary pressure".
The ATO's annual report, submitted in October last year revealed the Change Program is high risk and mostly responsible for the office’s budget overspend last financial year.
The program commenced in December 2004 at an estimated cost of $350-450 million and was set to be completed by the end of 2007. However, the budget has blown out to double the original figure, hitting close to $750 million.
In September, the ATO's Change Program Steering Committee approved plans for the agency to commence processing income tax returns on the new system from 1 February, 2010.
The latest date for completion for the project is July 2010 with business activity statements (BAS) excise and other remaining tax products to be "deployed onto the integrated core processing platform". A new portal for businesses, tax agents and BAS service providers will also be launched at this time.
In October last year the ATO also accepted the recommendations from the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) after the latter conducted a performance audit of the Change Program.
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Comments
Anonymous
And the good news is that from February 8th nobody in Australia would have to pay tax as the new National Tax Payer system will be indefinetely down for maintenance (fixing bugs-:)
Steves
All those 40 or 50 something year old technical contractors in the capital who were looking at taking forced early retirement will now have plenty of contracts to choose from!
Anonymous
Based on past parctice - and the ATO is infamous for repating the same mistakes in 10 year cycles - any future work will be handed over to Accenture to further "reward" them for producing a "dud". Lets not forget that a big item on the Change Program was to minimise (or completely eradicate) the use of individual contractors (that was long before the Gershon report so let's not give the ATO any credit for following the Government guidelines). The fact that all the money is going to an "offshore" based corporation putting thousands of hard working proffesionals out of a job does not seem to strike any sensitive nerves to anyone including the Rud Goverment. What is realy sad is that $1bln has been spend so far (none of it being used to stimulate the economy in any way) to replace a perfectly functioning system (one that has evolved over 30 years - not 30 years old as claimed by the ATO) by a less functional system of questionable value.
Man with no name
What's interesting about this article is that it is making a guesstimate based on a collection of previous articles and news items about the change program. With only 10 dates before the National Taxpayer System (NTS) replacement implementation rollout kicks in there is absolutely NO announcement from the ATO despite promising to make frequent public announcements about status. There is only one reason for that ... if you have something you are proud about you let everyone know, if all you have in your hands is embarrasing you keep quiet -:). Judgment day is only a few days away (until it get's postponed again -:). I am putting my money on yet another delay for at least another 6 months (being an optimist).
Manonymous
Lets face it, the ATO is good for only doing 2 things
(a) Collecting Taxes
(b) Spending Tax Payers Money on Crap IT Systems
Stuart Hinks
I got great news today, given this wonderful upgrade my LARGE Tax return (which I was counting on to pay bills as I dont have a job) is now held up till mid Feb even though it was submitted on 21st December 2009!!!! Thanks ATO how much interest should I charge you?
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