Andrew Leigh

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

ED HUSIC, SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

CUTS NO SOLUTION TO TAX OFFICE OUTAGES

The Turnbull Government is planning to keep cutting the Tax Office at a time when they are struggling to stay online.

Despite repeated outages, there are reports today that the Turnbull Government is planning to continue with its cuts over the next three years, climbing to almost $30 million.

This is madness.

The Turnbull Government needs to support our public servants and come clean on the rolling outages, which have disrupted so many Australians’ tax time.

Labor has repeatedly called for an investigation into these interruptions, but Malcolm Turnbull has team have done nothing to reassure the public.

The Turnbull Government hasn’t explained how the current staff will be able to cope with the on-going disruption of outages during tax time 2017 – not to mention the disruption to tax agents and the general public.

Before they take away more funding they need to do their own jobs and explain to the Australian people how secure the ATO’s website and lodgment system is and what they’ve done to stop it crashing again.

You don’t need to be a techspert to know that further cuts won’t help the Tax Office, which is already struggling after the Turnbull Government slashed more than 3000 jobs.

It's not good enough to blame the public servants. It’s time Malcolm Turnbull and his team took some responsibility.

FRIDAY, 28 JULY 2017