This was published 7 years ago
Nightmare before Christmas for thousands of public service casuals
By Noel Towell
Up to 2000 casual public servants at the ATO who missed out on work after the last week's tech disaster will get nothing, the agency's human resources bosses have confirmed.
The Tax Office, already facing a massive bill to fix up the "big ugly mess" left by the collapse of key IT systems says there will be no help for the workers either sent home or told not to show up to work last week, because they would not be able to log onto internal systems.
Picking up the pieces: Senior ATO executive Brad Chapman.
Commissioner of Taxation Chris Jordan promised last week there would be a full and independent investigation into what caused the "unprecedented" crash of systems that had been upgraded by private contractor Hewlett Packard just 13 months ago, throwing much of the ATO's work into chaos for five days.
Hundreds of Tax Office technicians and Hewlett Packard contractors are still working to restore systems as other tax officials try to tackle the backlog of work created by the collapse.
Among the big losers were large numbers of casuals, many of them working on getting tax returns finalised, who were either sent home or told not to show up as the full extent of the IT disaster revealed itself on Monday.
The Australian Services Union, which estimates that just under 2000 casuals might have been affected, pleaded with the Tax Office last week to do something for these workers and consider making an ex-gratia payment to help them through the holiday period.
"The ASU requests the commissioner make an ex gratia payment to make up for this loss to each casual employee that had legitimately expected to work for the ATO this week, but could not do so because of these outages," union official Jeff Lapidos wrote.
"Such payments would be much appreciated by these employees and would be seen by ongoing and non-ongoing employees as a sign of care and support by the commissioner."
But ATO human resources boss Fiona Dillon told the union the answer was no.
"While I am sorry that this week's system outages have affected the availability of work for some of our casual employees, this situation does not warrant ex-gratia payments," Ms Dillon wrote."ATO staff and business partners have been working to restore system functionality and casual shifts have already been recommencing."
Meanwhile, the revenue agency continues to pick up the pieces from one of its worst ever tech meltdowns with senior managers Craig Fox and Brad Chapman telling staff on Monday that work to "stabilise and restore" the ATO's systems was still under way.
"Over the weekend our experts, together with our partners at HPE, continued their work to restore and stabilise our systems," the two senior executives wrote.
"This work is ongoing and progressing well.
"Critical business functions are working, and we continue to progress through the backlog of refunds in the system to make sure payments are received before Christmas.
"We are also focusing on ensuring the Australian Business Register and eCommerce systems are fully functional.
"We are working with software developers and the super industry to test these systems."