Ross Greenwood has questioned ‘whether the tax office would be as patient with a taxpayer as what the tax office is expecting the taxpayer to be with the tax office’ following a second failure of the ATO’s online payment portal in recent months.

The tax authority’s web facility went down in December, and has now failed again for what Frances Cawthra, acting Second Commissioner at the ATO, says are completely unrelated reasons.

Many taxpayers have been unable to make their payments on time as a result.

Cawthra told Ross Greenwood the ATO is ‘so incredibly sorry’ for the failure, and asked for patience as the authority works with their technological partner Hewlett Packard to repair the system.

‘It’s going to take some time… it’s a very complex restore’.

Cawthra says the storage array at the centre of the failure is widely and successfully used by corporations, and the outage is a ‘very unexpected and highly irregular event’.

No taxpayer will be disadvantaged by the outage, she assured Ross.

Listen to the full interview with Frances Cawthra here: