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The ATO’s Online services have creaked under the pressure of moving its workforce to a remote working environment, with Online services for agents crashing on the first working day of the new myGovID regime.
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ATO systems falter under myGovID
01 April 2020
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11 minute read
On Monday, the ATO’s Online services for agents once again experienced disruptions, with agents unable to log in using the newly mandated myGovID identity credential.
An ATO spokesperson told Accountants Daily that a shift to a remote working environment for the ATO workforce in the wake of the Prime Minister’s plea for Australians to work remotely had contributed to the outage.
“On 30 March, a change in the nature of traffic in the ATO networks, compounded by a number of factors including support for our workforce as they work from home, resulted in intermittent to severe degradation of some of our services including myGovID,” the ATO spokesperson said.
“We made a number of adjustments to our infrastructure to rectify the issues identified and these changes have ensured that all services were restored for our clients [on Monday evening].”
The latest system disruption coincided with the first working day of myGovID after the decade-old AUSkey and Manage ABN Connections were retired.
myGovID and Relationship Authorisation Manager (RAM) will now be the only way to access the ATO’s Online services for agents, its Business Portal and a range of other government online services.
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Take-up has been far from perfect, with less than two-thirds of tax practitioners now using the new digital identity.
Of the 600,000 unique ABNs linked with RAM, 36,000 are registered tax professionals, composed of 25,200 tax agents and 10,800 BAS agents.
This accounts for just under 60 per cent of the 42,850 tax agents registered with the Tax Practitioners Board and two out three of the 15,801 registered BAS agent population.
The transition to myGovID has been riddled with issues from set-up difficulties to security and privacy concerns.
In spite of this and the ongoing coronavirus crisis, the ATO has maintained that the underlying AUSkey infrastructure was hardcoded to expire at the end of March and could not be extended further.
- My phone still needs to be re-booted for the pathetic app to work properly if I have used it more than a couple of times in a day. I wonder how much they paid for the myGovID app to be created.0
- Tax agents are on the front line trying to help our clients provide data to centrelink, prepare BAS's; meet practice lodgement target deadlines.
When RAM does work, it is slower and more cumbersome than AusKey was; as we sit watching the circle spin to be told that the system works please try again in 20 minutes. It takes significantly longer to log in even when things are working, than the system it replaced.
It's bad enough at the time running a business; without the ATO's denial of service caused by its own incompetence implementing a technical upgrade nobody outside the ATO appeared to even want in the first place.
There's a saying, if it ain't broke DONT FIX IT.0 - Well actually there are more than 77,000 tax agents and there are over 14.8m entities that have been issued with an ABN so this shows what a shambolic debacle this outdated device based authentication implementation is just as we have been warning the ATO and the Government ever since the security plagued SBR introduction. It is overly complex to implement and does not add any additional security because the fall back is to the user email service. Instead of listening to us and implementing device independent multilevel authentication the ATO has instead continued to attack us to silence us and the Government has stood by compliantly refusing to step in to prevent this injustice. As a result of their cowardice the Government are now presiding over what must be the greatest imposition on the Government revenue collection system in the history of Federation at the worst possible time. What a disgrace, ultimately there will be and should be a royal commission into this fiasco and the senior management of the ATO and its Directors and Commissioners and the Government Ministers and senior treasury officials should be sanctioned for their arrogant corrupt actions.0
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