ATO awards IBM an Amazon project worth millions

The Australian Taxation Office has awarded IBM a $4 million contract to develop an electronic commerce gateway connecting the ATO with businesses.

The e-commerce gateway will be implemented in the AWS cloud environment and support traffic between businesses’ tax reporting software and the tax office, with plans to later support SuperStream reporting – the method through which businesses make employee superannuation contributions – and other commercial software products.

The platform is also expected to support future programs such as single-touch payroll.

IBM had previously been approached to implement whole of government standard business reporting functionality in line with the ATO’s electronic commerce capability.

'Big Blue' will implement this new mission-critical capability within the framework developed by Accenture, which was earlier engaged by the ATO to migrate one of the department's applications to AWS.

The project is part of the ATO’s Reinvention program, through which the department are working to simplify reporting obligations to government for taxpayers and professionals intermediaries.

Last month, Craig Fox, ATO service operations A/g first assistant commissioner, opened up about its 18-month relationship with AWS. "Some of the disruption that we have seen of a very positive nature in the ATO has really started from the time that we adopted this relationship with AWS."

Support desk and centralised computing services will be handled by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, in line with its ongoing work with the ATO.