ATO details ICT supplier payments

A clarification was made to this story. Read below for details.

In complying with a Senate Order, the Australian Taxation Office has released a detailed list of current contracts dominated by technology deals made over the past decade.

The list contains contracts that were either signed during the 2008 calendar year or signed in a previous year but still not completed.

The largest single contract the ATO listed was the agency-wide IT outsourcing deal with EDS, inked in 1999. The deal has cost $2.4 billion and is set to end in 2010 after the ATO selects a raft of new IT infrastructure providers.

Also featuring heavily amongst the ATO's technology-related deals were IT contractors from a range of ICT recruitment firms it had brought in for its Change Program. Companies in this category included CSC and Infosys under short-term contracts of between one to two years. The largest provider, however, was Accenture which has collected $550 million under the ongoing project. Its contract is due to end in 2010.

ACT-based outfit Compas, also stands to earn around $13 million from the ATO between 2007 and 2009.

Consultancies Booze Allen, Boston Consulting Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers had also scooped around $4 million in the provision of ICT procurement advice and assisting to devise the ATO's new multi-sourcing regime.

Exactly what Telstra stands to lose in the coming months as the ATO finalises its multi-sourcing plans was also outlined in the document. Prior to Christmas last year, Telstra was knocked out of the race for the ATO's managed network services contract, leaving Dimension Data and Optus still in the running.

Through several deals, Telstra has collected $134 million from the ATO since 2004. Local IT services firm DWS Advanced Business Solutions earned $26.8 million in maintaining the agency's e-tax system since 2003, but that deal went up for grabs in December last year.

Other big winners include the provider of the agency's national telephone call management system, NEC Business Solutions, which managed the system since 2000 and earned $133 million. That deal is also up for renewal this year.

This week's announcement by Minister of Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, that Defence had sealed a government-wide volume-sourcing agreement with Microsoft, was bad but expected news for Dimension Data. The company held a five-year, $47 million Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement with the ATO that will end in October this year. That business will now go through local IT services firm, Data#3, which won the deal through Defence in November last year.