ATO website outages putting tax returns at risk
The Australian Taxation Office should pay small business owners compensation say experts, after the agency’s online services were down for hours yesterday.
The failure comes just days after the ATO delivered a report into the technological failing of its websites over the past year, including an outage that downed services for five days.
Due to the ongoing problems, businesses are being unfairly hit with infringement notices, warn taxation experts.
Co-founder Jamie Davison of the Carbon Group, a technology accounting firm, said the continuing website outages could see Australians to “lose faith in the ATO” with the possibility that many will not want to lodge a tax return online.
“If it continues general taxpayers just won’t lodge their tax returns at all,” he said. “It it’s too hard, they just won’t do it.
“It wasn’t so frustrating at the beginning but now it’s becoming a regular occurrence.”
More than three million Australians lodged their tax returns online last year.
Mr Davison said website’s failures had caused “anguish” for small businesses with accountants trying to lodge quarterly business activity statements on time.
“They have strict deadlines and the ATO systems issue default penalties and infringements if things aren’t lodged on time,” he said.
“They’ll eventually reverse the charges but customers are getting frustrated and they’re getting frustrated with us rather than the ATO. It’s causing a lot of anguish for clients.”