Tax commissioner says businesses need a plan for when the ATO goes down.
Tax commissioner Chris Jordan has warned that the technical outages that have caused disruption for businesses are “a fact of modern life” and not going to cease.
In the wake of continuing outages at the Australian Tax Office, Mr Jordan warned businesses and tax professionals to brace for more.
Mr Jordan told the Vodafone National Small Business Summit on Friday cyber security is a concern for all organisations, including the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) but that outages would still happen. “Systems go down right,” he said referring to a power failure disrupting the Reserve Bank of Australia’s payment systems last week.“We had all the refunds pumping out and every second Thursday is pay day so I thought it was going to be impossible,” he said. “Telstra goes down, the bank goes down, our system might go offline for a while. This is a fact of modern life that is not going to go away.”
Mr Jordan said businesses and tax agents need to be prepared for when major organisations have outages.