ATO issues RFT for budgeting and forecasting solution

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has issued a tender to modernise its budgeting, forecasting and reporting capability.

The government agency wants a solution able to support better decision making and that enhances stewardship of the ATO’s budget in line with its Strategy and Enterprise Resource Planning transformation priorities.

Cognos EP (also known as IBM Cognos Enterprise Planning) is currently used by the ATO to support budgeting, forecasting, and financial plan consolidation across the organisation. It also underpins critical financial reporting required under the PGPA Act and other legislative obligations.

In 2024, the ATO initiated the Budgeting and Reporting Solution (BaRS) project to deliver a secure, fit-for-purpose, and contemporary budgeting, reporting and forecasting system to replace the legacy Cognos EP application.

With a contemporary system, the ATO said it can align to the ATO Digital Strategy and the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) ERP Finance Standards for financial reporting, planning and budget management. This project directly supports the ATO’s ERP Program by addressing key reform themes, including the elimination of manual processes, reducing reliance on legacy systems, and enabling data-driven decision-making.

The ATO is seeking to procure a suitable supplier to provide a solution via commercial off-the-shelf Software (COTS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) product(s) and associated Services. The supplier will be a systems integrator and will implement and integrate the product(s) into the ATO environment.

The ATO said it prefers to procure software licences directly from the software vendor and where a tenderer proposes to provide software licences or subscriptions as part of its solution, the ATO must retain ongoing rights to use all implemented products for the duration of the contract.

If the Supplier’s proposed solution and products will be managed on premises, the ATO said the supplier must be willing to participate in an IRAP assessment as part of the Cyber Security Assessment process.

The solution’s hosting environment must be in a secure, sovereign environment, hosted on Australian soil and enable IP address restrictions to internal Australian IP addresses only. It must provide options for storing PROTECTED data, to be encrypted at rest and in-transit to comply with ATO's data privacy policies and APS legislative requirements.

The RFT also said the supplier must undergo Cyber Security Vendor Evaluations in accordance with the PSPF Directive to assess third party cyber supply chain risk and must be willing to partake in an annual review for the life of the contract.

The tender closes at 2:00 pm (ACT Local Time) on 31 August.