The Tax Office says it will achieve recommended reforms of its IT systems by the end of 2018 following investigations into two massive outages that in one case took multiple days to resolve.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Australian Taxation Office chief information officer Ramez Katf said since the tech failures in December 2016 and February 2017, the agency had finished making 10 of 14 changes recommended in a review following the crashes.
The national auditor in a report released on Tuesday said the ATO's response to the outages hitting its IT systems was effective, despite shortcomings in a plan it used when handling problems with critical infrastructure.
It said while the Tax Office had made progress making the recommended changes, "considerable work" was needed to make the other planned reforms before the ATO achieved many of their intended results.
Mr Katf said the ATO had made further headway since the Australian National Audit Office's report, and that it would make changes in four other recommendations before the year's end, including recruiting more people with IT skills.
The Tax Office had been disappointed to find itself dealing with the two outages but had acted "absolutely deliberately and with the right intent" in responding to them, he said.
"I couldn't fault any of the actions we took at the time," Mr Katf said.
The agency did need to extend its communication and share its IT infrastructure more openly and seamlessly with stakeholders, he said.
"We're very focused on improving the trust and confidence people have in the overall tax system and the technology we have supporting this," he said.
In June, a separate report found technicians failed to effectively respond to the outages for nearly four hours, adding to chaos caused by warning and back-up systems that were not fully operational.
Another report by consultants PwC released in December found initial actions taken in response to the failure were not successful because of a previously unknown issue with one of the storage network components, a lower than expected "resilience posture" and some features having not being fully implemented.
The response was further hampered by the fact some control, management and monitoring systems were inaccessible because they were dependent on the hardware which had failed.
Mr Katf admitted that those systems shouldn't have been set up in that way, and that the problem added 24 hours to the ATO's response to the failure, proving an "unhelpful" feature.
Despite criticisms of Australian Public Service agencies' use of consultants and contractors, he said it had balanced internal IT skills with its use of contracts to source those that were harder to retain.
The national auditor also found the ATO lacked service commitments relating especially to the availability of its IT systems, but that the Tax Office did specify system outage tolerances in its major contracts with service providers.
"To monitor the impact of ICT service outages on satisfaction with its services, the ATO should develop service standards that are aligned with system outage tolerances in its contracts with ICT service providers," it said.
The report said that despite its limited planning for the critical failures, the ATO's responses to the incidents were largely effective, as it worked closely with the contracted ICT service providers to identify the system fault and restore services.
