ATO launches credit payment service
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is looking for a payments provider to enable a service allowing customers to pay bills via credit card.
(Too Much Credit image by Andres Rueda, CC2.0)
The move follows a boom in the number of phone and internet transactions, which have roughly increased by 1 million each year since 2007, according to tender documents.
The office conducted 9.4 million phone and internet transactions in the year to June, and a record 255,000 transactions in 2 March this year. It averages about 80,000 transactions a month.
The ATO converted thousands of customers to credit payments through a hushed 18-month trial of the services early last year, which peaked at 9024 transactions in March, despite the agency not advertising the service. It now hopes to have an official credit payment service up by April 2011.
The agency stated in tender documents that the payments provider must be fully compliant with the Payment Cards Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS), have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and be able to integrate with the agency's IT systems.
Separately, the ATO is also calling for a data modelling contractor to help build the agency's core conceptual and logical business data models, and to "ensure project data requirements are aligned to the enterprise model".
The 12-month role starts from 17 September and includes an optional year extension.