ATO loses a million gigabytes of data
Tax commissioner Chris Jordan has kicked off an independent review into the technology crash that knocked out its online services for large parts of this week, promising it would ascertain the definitive cause of the the failure of the storage technology it had bought from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
In a statement released on Friday, Mr Jordan said that since the crash on Monday, Australian Taxation Office and HPE staff had worked around the clock to restore systems progressively, and that its website, the Tax Agent Portal, BAS Portal and Business Portals were now back up and running.
He apologised for the inconvenience the outages had caused and said the independent expert's review would determine the nature of the failures and their root causes, as well as the adequacy of back-up and contingency arrangements, and the likelihood of recurrence.
"I will be doing everything I can to learn from what has happened this week and to put in place any necessary changes to minimise the risk of any recurrence," Mr Jordan said.
"Let me confirm there has been no loss or compromise of data. The issues we have experienced this week do not relate to our overall IT capability or skills."
When contacted by The Australian Financial Review, the ATO refused to say who the independent expert would be, how long the review would take, or whether it could be used to form a case for compensation against HPE.
Following this year's Census technology failure at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, key technology supplier IBM took both a public rebuke from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and agreed to pay expensive compensation of $30 million.
Mr Jordan described this week's problems as the ATO's "worst unplanned system outage in recent memory," and suggested other HPE customers around the world could suffer the same fate.
He said the initial failure of the HPE storage network, which was upgraded in November 2015, had been compounded by the subsequent failure of its back-up arrangements to work as planned. This meant that restoration of its systems and resumption services had been very complex and time consuming.
"This was an extremely unusual and unfortunate event with the outage caused by a significant and unprecedented failure of storage hardware," Mr Jordan said.
"The storage hardware was upgraded in November 2015 by Hewlett Packard Enterprise after a lengthy and thorough selection process, and was seen to be 'state-of the-art' at the time.
"We understand the use of this storage hardware is not unique to the ATO and is basically the same used by other large clients of HPE in Australia and across the globe."
HPE declined to answer specific questions about the problems with its equipment, and provided a statement on Thursday evening, ahead of Mr Jordan's announcement of a review, saying that getting the ATO systems up and running again was its priority.
"HPE has taken immediate action to help resolve the hardware issues which have impacted the ATO's online services, portals and website," HPE's statement said.
"This is a top priority for HPE and we continue to manage this closely with our client to ensure that all the systems are restored to functionality as soon as possible."
The terms of the independent review will include investigating whether there is anything unique or unusual in the ATO's technology environment that led to the problems or would lead to a risk of a repeat occurrence.
The independent reviewer will also make observations about the ATO's approaches to inform and update the community, the government and staff on the situation.
Mr Jordan also reiterated his statement of Thursday, which said that no taxpayers would be disadvantaged as a result of the outage.
This means if a payment or lodgement of a form is late as a result of the outage, there will be no penalty.
Citizens or businesses with questions about any repercussions of the tech outages have been told to call the ATO on 13 28 61.
