Technical difficulties that had locked out many users seeking to do their tax returns via myGov had not impacted the processing of already lodged returns in any way, the ATO confirmed on Friday.
Late last week, some of the ATO’s services, including the portals and the online services via myGov, were unavailable or experiencing slowness. The government’s myGov service was also offline, affecting Australians looking to access Medicare, Centrelink and the ATO.
According to a spokesperson from the ATO, the outage was unrelated to the Telstra outage, and was not caused by the increased number of taxpayers accessing their accounts at this time of the year.
“Our online services are back up and running. Thanks for your patience. We apologise again for the inconvenience. Yesterday’s issue didn’t impact processing of lodged returns. Refunds continued to be paid into people’s bank accounts yesterday and will continue as normal next week,” the ATO said on Friday when its services were restored.
The ATO revealed on Friday it was scheduled to pay a total of 500,000 refunds worth $1.2 billion into people’s bank accounts.
By that stage, the Tax Office had already processed over 1 million returns and made 390,000 refunds valued at $882 million.
The ATO recently confirmed it has seen increased activity this tax time, with taxpayers flocking to process their returns as soon as possible and take advantage of the government’s tax cuts, which will see millions pocket up to $1,080.
