ATO renews Leidos Australia service management contract worth AU$87m
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has renewed its contract with Leidos Australia for another 29 months that will see the IT provider continue to deliver the agency with service desk and IT service management.
Under the renewed contract, valued at approximately AU$87 million, Leidos will deliver a modernisation project that will include a new IT service management platform, as well as enhance the current information technology infrastructure library processes, and service integration and management model.
"We are delighted to continue delivering these quality services and supporting the ATO in achieving their strategic objectives," Leidos Australia CEO Christine Zeitz said.
The contract follows on from the end-user computing work Leidos Australia has been doing for the government department agency since 2010, when the contract was initially awarded.
Last year in March, Leidos escaped being penalised after the ATO faced a series of issues that had plagued the taxation office since late 2016, including "one-of-a-kind" SAN outages, and although the ATO said issues were rectified, further service disruptions ensued, resulting in the ATO website being pulled offline.
The government department had to turn its mainframe off and switch it back on again in July 2017 when a disruption occurred five days into the new financial year.
Following that, the department responded with promises of "smooth operating" IT, as well as the assurance of a more "connected and bulletproof" system than ever before.
In addressing the Finance and Public Administration References Committee, ATO's CIO Ramez Katf and CDO John Dardo confirmed the agency imposed penalties on DXC Technology -- which owns Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the company that was contracted as the storage solution provider for the ATO -- for allowing the SAN outage to occur the data centre.
More recently, in July, the ATO's services, including its portals and myGov online functions, were down once again. Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers labelled the outage as a "monumental stuff up", saying the Australian government needed to fix the outage so that people could lodge their tax returns.
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