Tax Practitioners Board signs ASG for cloud services

The Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) has appointed IT services provider ASG Group as its new IT provider under a newly inked contract.

The TPB is a government agency that regulates tax agents independently of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), though staff at the TPB is employed by the ATO. It regulates over 53,000 tax practitioners. The new systems and services provided by ASG will be vital for the registration and regulation of these practitioners, according to TPB.

As part of the contract, ASG will roll out virtual desktops with applications and data sitting on a central virtual server for TPB. The set-up is device agnostic, to facilitate remote access, and will be deployed across business locations in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

The move to ASG marks the start of a physical and logistical separation of systems and services from the ATO, according to TPB secretary Mark Maskell, who also said that this will give the agency more control in making IT decisions.

"I am proud that the TPB is one of the first Australian government agencies to use an all-cloud-based solution," Maskell said in a statement. "This will enable us to be more agile and efficient, which will ultimately benefit the tax practitioners we regulate."

Both TPB and ASG were unable to disclose the value of the contract.