ATO briefs on massive contract

THE Australian Taxation Office will conduct its first briefing for potential tech suppliers to its $1 billion outsourcing plan.

The briefing covers the first stage of a program that will eventually replace the nine-year outsourcing contract the ATO has held with US services giant Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

The ATO announced through the Commonwealth tenders website it would meet with interested suppliers to the Managed Network Services component of its plans on Monday December 17.

The Tax Office said its sourcing plans called for market testing of various services between mid-next year and mid-2010. It plans to issue a series of Expressions of Interest (EoIs) and Requests for Tender (RfTs) during that period.

The first EOI, for Managed Network Services, will be released in late January. It will cover areas ranging from voice, mobile and data carriage services, desktop handsets and PBX systems, network switches and security gateways.

Following the EOI, the Tax Office is expected to select a shortlist of suppliers to participate in further briefings and workshops before being invited to respond to a formal RfT.

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ATO opens eTax to non-Microsoft platforms

LINUX and Macintosh users will soon be able to file their tax returns online – just as Microsoft users have for a decade – as the ATO revamps its eTax system to make it platform agnostic.

Tax Commissioner Michael D’Ascenzo said for the second year running more people filed their tax returns electronically than with paper.

More than 1.6 million people lodged online, Mr D’Ascenzo said, 75 per cent of them repeat users from the previous year.

And all of them were Windows users, because since the ATO started trialling eTax in 1997, the system has only been available for Windows users.

Mr D’Ascenzo said the ATO would over the next two years completely revamp the eTax platform, adding more functionality and making it accessible to anyone with access to the Internet.

The revamp is being carried out by IBM under a $4.4 million contract awarded to the company last December.

“Looking even further ahead we will redevelop e-tax to make it compatible with any computer system that has internet access,” Mr D’Ascenzo.

“We will test this with a small group of users in 2008, aiming to make it available more broadly in future years – pending the success of the trials.”

Mr D’Ascenzo said the eTax system had been expanded for this financial year to include an enhanced ability to download information from third-party sources. This will include more than 20 banks for interest data, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs to assess pension payments, the Department of Eduction to assess allowances and Medicare for out of pocket medical expenses.

ETax users have already been able to download information from Centrelink, Medicare Australia, the Family Assistance Office.

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Accenture bites ATO for another $274m

THE Australian Taxation Office has gifted consulting services giant Accenture another $274 million worth of business as part of its ongoing Change Program technology update.

Accenture was handed a contract worth $224 million to build the Tax Office a new software platform to handle changes to superannuation laws.

The company would also be paid an additional $50 million to cover the cost of additional work under the Change Program resulting from function creep and shifts in tax law.

The lion’s share of the $50 million Change Program overspend is thought to also have been awarded to Accenture.

The $224 million superannuation systems contract was awarded to Accenture at the end of last month, with details released to newspapers this week.

Unusually for such a large federal government contract, the superannuation business was not put to an open tender process but awarded through a direct sourcing arrangement to Accenture.

Accenture also performed the deployment analysis for the superannuation system, though it is not clear how much it was paid for this work.

On November 1 last year Accenture was given a $2.5 million contract extension to cover further work on analysis for the superannuation deployment – a contract that was to expire on February 28. Then on February 28, it was awarded the $224 million superannuation

None of the more $540 million in contracts the ATO has awarded Accenture under the Change Program banner has been put to open tender.

ATO second commissioner Greg Farr told The Australian newspaper that Tax would send staff to work in a new Wollongong development centre planned by Accenture – to work alongside Accenture staff.

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ATO online apps hit by Vista problems

JUST as the nation’s top tax collector Michael D’Ascenzo announced aggressive new targets to get people to lodge returns electronics, the Australian Taxation Office says it has been hit by Microsoft Windows Vista compatibility problems.

The ATO has been one of the most advanced Federal departments in developing and deploying web applications and web services to simplify tax compliance for both individuals and businesses – largely through its $450 million Change Program.

Last year, 90 per cent of taxpayers lodged returns electronically, and as Tax Commissioner Mr D’Ascenzo had set a target for this year of boosting electronic returns to 95 per cent of taxpayers.

But the target – set last month – has already been given a setback with the ATO reporting a series of problems for both individual taxpayers and businesses in getting Microsoft’s new Windows Vista applications to work with its back office systems.

The Vista problems are ironic for the ATO, which has worked hand-in-glove with Microsoft on its online services and web services back-end systems for the past five years.

The ATO was one of the first major users to throw its weight behind Microsoft’s .NET architecture as a Beta customer, and Microsoft used Tax as a global reference site in the early days of .Net release.

The ATO has now published the Vista problems on its website. The problems relate largely to accessing and updating electronic forms.

The ATO said:
· electronic forms are placed in a temporary location and will be automatically erased by Windows Vista. This means the user could lose all of their saved electronic forms
· The ATO record-keeping evaluation tool can still be used with Vista, but users will be unable to access the help application,
· The personal tax record keep will work with Vista, but only with reduced useability – and some text can become scrambled
· When using the facilitated lodgement tools with Vista the users’ portal activity statement will not be pre-populated with their information.

The ATO has issued work-arounds for most of the problems and said that Microsoft had been made aware of the issues.

Despite the issues, Mr D’Ascenzo told a conference of tax specialists at Queensland University last month that the Change Program was on track, and that the change program Release 2 work – where it implemented Siebel Case Management and Work Management systems had been a resounding success.

The ATO’s independent assurer Cap Gemini said the project was the largest Siebel case management roll out anywhere in the world.

“This has been a major undertaking,” Mr D’Ascenzo said.

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