CANBERRA: The ATO has lost a key tech executive, but says a plan to push into cloud computing will make it perform better and avoid a future recurrence of its tax-time crash. Long-standing Assistant Commissioner for service operations Craig Fox, who has been helping the ATO devise its move to host its systems in the cloud, has resigned after 34 years with the ATO, but said he expected the ATO’s tech migration to be completed within two years.
The ATO is changing the way it runs its technology systems as part of a broader government “cloud first” policy, but has added urgency to fix its systems after long and costly systems outages in December and February caused chaos for accountants. It is expected that systems running in the cloud, provided principally by Amazon Web Services and Macquarie Cloud Services, will give the ATO capacity to manage the demand for its services in busier times and give it more flexibility to experiment with new technology such as artificial intelligence with machine learning and expanded biometrics. Mr Fox spoke to The Australian Financial Review at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Canberra at the end of August, but has since resigned to take up an as-yet-unspecified new opportunity. “As well as fully restoring services I guess you try and turn the negative exposure last year into a positive,” he said. “When an outage like that happens, you have to look for opportunities to re-platform; that means we could look at ways to set ourselves up differently, rather than just looking to restore and build what we already had.”
While the shift is good news for AWS, which is currently engaged in a public sector land grab against Microsoft, Mr Fox said it wasn’t a straightforward process to pick up decades-old systems and start running them in the cloud. He also said the ATO was working with Microsoft’s Azure platform in some areas alongside AWS. He said the shift in technology wasn’t entirely about reliability, and that he believed its upgraded arrangements would give it more opportunity to design new public-facing systems and take advantage of emerging technology without it being so time-consuming.
