ATO to pull plug on legacy website
The Tax Office will transition fully to its modern interface at the end of the month after being in beta mode since November.
The ATO will retire its legacy website and take its successor out of beta testing on Tuesday, completing the transition over to the updated interface three months after it was introduced.
“Our previous website platform had been in place for nearly a decade and was coming to the end of its service life," the ATO said.
“This gave us an opportunity to deliver an improved website – making it easier for you to self‑serve and access information.”
It said the updated website was built following research, concept testing and feedback through consultation with users.
The changes made to the website included simplifying the home page and improving navigation and menu structures “to present information in a clear and logical way”, it said. Search functionality was also enhanced to allow users to find information more efficiently.
However, the site’s address, links, quick codes, tax and super content and tools and calculators would remain unchanged.
In early November, the ATO made the updated website available to the public in beta mode while retaining the older site under the URL “legacy.ato.gov.au” while teething issues were ironed out.
Users quickly began reporting glitches with database search functions, calculators and links not working correctly.
“Google links to ATO pages wouldn’t load and the portal was hit and miss today as well. Very frustrating,” said one commenter on LinkedIn.
“Search function on the legal database doesn’t seem to work in Chrome (on either beta or redirected legacy). Legacy works in Safari,” said another.
The site’s temporarily malfunctioning calculators also made one practitioner resort to other methods of determining their tax liability. “The ATO calculators do not appear to work at all as well. I had to dig out an old Excel company division 7A loan workpaper for my colleagues,” they said.
While reports of glitches have since died down, the ATO’s webpage on “beta website performance” currently lists unresolved issues such as accessibility functions not displaying correctly, an inability to print calculator results and links not working where content pages were saved as PDFs.
Content and hyperlinks were reported as being duplicated and when viewed on a mobile, the updated website also encountered display issues and flickering pages.
Additionally, the ATO said it was working on correcting broken links, intermittent 404 errors for ATO law links and an inconsistent website footer.
“We are updating the ATO website to make it easier for you to find the information you need. Our work to improve the beta site is still underway, and we are addressing any issues as quickly as we can,” it said.
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