We’re always on the ball here at Pherrus Financial Services, and dedicated to making life easier for our clients with our customary speed and expertise. Occasionally, though, we’re at the mercy of factors outside our control, just as you might be. One such example of this is recent events relating to the Australian Tax Office (ATO) and the issues that have occurred with its website. This has had a knock-on effect on our respected clients, and the services we have been able to provide for you in recent times.

The ATO’s online system has repeatedly crashed, with major outages taking place in December 2016 and more recently in February 2017; when the system suffered a two day outage. This means that, despite the continued hard work and dedication of our team, we have unfortunately been delayed in some cases. Because of these issues, our staff were unable to access necessary information such as the Australian Business Register, ATO Tax Agent Portal, and numerous other services. Without this crucial data at our disposal, the team was unfortunately unable to carry out our usual financial solutions to the best of our ability; meaning our clients were unavoidably inconvenienced as a result.

The outages occurred, apparently, as a result of “an unprecedented failure of storage hardware”, which had been upgraded by Hewlett Packard in November 2015. Thankfully, at least, no taxpayer information has been lost or compromised as a result of these events, and no more outages are predicted. We, like you, eagerly await an explanation for these problems, and with both internal and external reviews taking place to ascertain the cause, this should shed some light on the situation, and help prevent further issues from arising in future. Once we too have this information to hand, we’ll be happy to share it with you should you be interested.

Thankfully, now that the ATO has regained control of its services, we are able to perform all the usual tasks our clients expect, with our customary expertise and professionalism. With a dedication to you, the client, we are now working twice as hard to catch up as a result of these delays, and to deliver quality strategies and advice, so you can rest assured that your tax services are being worked on by our versatile and multi disciplinary team. We appreciate your patience in this matter, and hope that you can understand that our hands were tied in this matter.

Pherrus now looks forward to resuming our role as one of Sydney’s leading online tax service companies. With our team of tax specialists (including accountants, agents, lawyers, and consultants) we’re perfectly placed to deal with the task at hand, no matter how big or small. Should you have any tax issues or queries, we’re sure that we’ll be able to work out a customised solution for you now that we have all the necessary information at our disposal.

The Insights published on our website have been written by our professional staff strictly for educational purposes. Please note that the information and views expressed above do not constitute professional advice and are general in nature only.

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