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The disruption to online services used by practitioners on Monday coincided with reports of taxpayers waiting hours to lodge individual returns.
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ATO portal’s 24-hour malfunction vexes tax agents
03 July 2024
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The Tax Office's website faced major technical difficulties on Monday that left frustrated practitioners across the country unable to access client correspondences and perform routine tasks for almost 24 hours.
The disruption to the ATO’s online services for agents (OSfA) portal coincided with taxpayers facing hour-long delays while using online services for individuals to lodge returns.
Reports of problems with OSfA began circulating in the morning, with practitioners experiencing difficulties logging in or encountering pages that failed to load.
“The site just wasn't functional,” said Joe Kaleb, a Sydney-based chartered accountant. “Some people could get in, but it was very, very slow.”
The ATO's OSfA dashboard, which tracks service disruptions, said the portal was “experiencing degraded performance” at 1:55pm on Monday.
It said it had identified the issue at 9:03pm and was deploying changes overnight, according to the incident report.
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The issue appeared to be resolved early Tuesday, with an update at 10:04am reporting “all services are operating as expected”.
OSfA is used by over 62,000 tax practitioners in the country to interact with the ATO and clients.
Kaleb said agents accessed the portal every day to look up client details, lodge activity statements, check client correspondences and perform various other essential tasks.
“It's our Bible,” he said. “We rely on it so much. We go in every day.”
“The most important thing is client correspondence to see what assessments have come through or what other information the clients or the ATO has sent regarding my clients.”
Kaleb said he did not receive any notifications from the ATO about the issue, finding out through colleagues instead.
“It was a colleague who contacted me in the morning,” he said. “When I tried [logging in], it was nine o'clock in the morning. And I couldn't get in. When I contacted another practitioner, he said the same thing.”
“We got no official explanation. We used to get emails from the ATO to say the portal was down. But the ATO don't advise us anymore.”
On the same day OSfA was down, taxpayers also encountered technical difficulties while using online services for individuals, with some reporting spending hours in the ATO's online waiting room to lodge returns.
They were met with a message saying, "Hang tight! You’re in the queue."
An ATO spokesperson told Accountants Daily the waiting room used for individuals had been in place since 2020 to manage periods of “excessive demand or unforeseen events affecting system performance”.
The same feature was not implemented for tax practitioners using OSfA.
“We're aware that some users of online services for agents experienced intermittent slow response times on Monday 1 July 2024 as we managed the high volumes throughout the day,” the ATO said.
“Response times for online services for agents have returned to normal and the ATO continues to monitor the performance and availability of our systems. We appreciate your patience at this time.”
Monday’s issues with the ATO’s online services for agents and individuals are the latest in a series of interruptions, usually occurring around lodgment dates where activity is at its highest.
“It's obviously very frustrating every time because these aren't one-off incidents, they're regular occurrences,” Kaleb said.
“It just puts you behind the eight ball every time because it disrupts your workflow during the day. Whatever you're doing, you have to put down and come back to it the next day.”
Last week, the OSfA dashboard reported an outage for client correspondence for just under seven hours, days before the financial year-end.
In early May, when individual and trust tax returns were due, a similar “service degradation” was reported for five hours.
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