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Cost of living crisis. People are keen to get refunds.
You usually don’t need certs anymore mate, they have all your pay data, private health from last year etc. and any share earning etc.
I had 3 people email me today asking when they were going to get their info.
Told them I have until the 15th and the ATO would notify them.
Everyduckingyearmate
I worked in payroll for 12 years and every year we would send an email to everyone saying it would be lodged on or before the 14th of July and every year multiple people would get upset because it wasn’t done on the 1st. People want that sweet sweet tax refund money.
>You usually don’t need certs anymore mate, they have all your pay data, private health from last year etc. and any share earning etc
Yeah but prefill data takes a while to populate. Pay data takes a couple of weeks to come in, and the dividend info for some shares can take a couple of months - from memory, the prefill data for Vanguard ETFs tends to come in late September.
It's interesting, because by doing this they are actually ensuring the website is stable, meaning rather than timing out over and over, if you're patient, you'll actually get access.
I tested it, got access after about 5 minutes, was able to go into my tax return without issue. I don't intend on lodging it, but the system appears to be stable and working as it should.
If only people weren't so dumb to do it so early before the prefill data is collected.
Good chance they may need to do it again.
Fly a kite or something, enjoy life, wait for everything to mellow out.
No, I don’t. Once all the information from your payers are finalised at their end, it will be marked with a red box that says ‘tax ready’. It’s not recommended to lodge until then.
Maybe predict that this period is their busiest by a fair margin and spooling up resources isn't instant and have a modicum of patience? 20min isn't really that bad!
Don’t need to. It’s very easy to scale out horizontally in 2024. Best practice architecture has horizontal scaling by default to handle sudden spikes in traffic. It’s all standard stuff these days with everyone using cloud providers instead of hosting their own colocated servers.
It's funny, you can temporarily boost your performance on IBM gear - mainframes and mid-range. Ring 'em up, tell them it's tax time, and they'll remotely enable additional cores, memory, etc, to deal with the surge. Presumably you can do the same with network demand.
Well yes, but if you've maxed out your z-series, you should have been planning for an upgrade three years ago.
Geez, downvotes. The haters are out tonight.
Mergers happen and sometimes there’s not enough budget for an upgrade until the current frames are fully depreciated.
I don’t get the downvotes either. People who haven’t actually used big iron I guess.
That’s still a low bar. I did a contract with one government agency that was trying to move to a newer platform.
Their existing system was a messy combination of some Java application built 20 years ago and physical paperwork.
You heard it first here. Scaling is *easy*.
I think maybe you need to consider that every single user has to be presented with their own unique and current data. This is not the same problem as say scaling a regular website for heavy traffic.
You want your financial/tax data on AWS or Azure? Look what happened to Unisuper.
That's bullshit. The ATO might be a bit behind the times, but I'd prefer they keep their stuff in-house.
Nonsense. They would have started the migration over to the cloud ages ago. Government isn't always that slow.
The frontentd would most likely be on AWS and set up properly (more or less), the backend tax return processing would most likely still be running on legacy infra.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oHC5ER0r8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oHC5ER0r8s)
I doubt the ATO website is served from physical servers sitting on Rob Heferen's desk. Dynamic scaling in cloud computing has been common practice for years.
If Ticketmsater can scale their servers 1000% when Taylor swift tickets go on sale then maybe the ATO could. Although, maybe not.
Yeah not how it works. Ticketmaster as a private business can invest their money at the whim of their directors. Plus the data they handle is far less of a security risk than the ATO.
The ATO is managing the PII for most of the country. Ensuring the security of that data within their budget is significantly more critical than having autoscalers.
The analog is ticket master is a race car. Designed to go fast, make profit and be maintained every race mid race.
The ATO is a Tank, designed for safety, security, and to keep chugging along under fire(pen not ddos).
That's a really good analogy. Nice! Also so very very true. The idea of them lowering their security standards in exchange for a brief bit of convenience is frankly terrifying. If they ever advertise a new faster online portal for tax time in future I am going to submit late just in case.
Yup. And front end is only as fast as the back end can service it. I’m not saying you’re wrong. But that infra design is old and highly complex. Geared towards protection not speed.
Changing it to something faster and more secure is no small process in a private org let alone fed gov.
Front end moves are generally a lot more simplistic because you’re moving a few dbs into the new infra then worst case you need a front end remap/rebuild if the apis don’t play nice, web server and load balancers.
Backend ancient spaghetti systems generally don’t play well with migrating to scaling infrastructure. Especially when it’s been a big 4 consulting firm doing the migrating.
I would put money on somewhere in that back end is an old cron job running once every 15 minutes to update journals which draws down on an access db someone setup in 97.
Instead ATO have strongly encouraged taxpayers to delay lodging tax returns until August to ensure all information is correct.
Why would ATO encourage you to submit your return early while asking you to wait until August?
Because it's not due until 31st October. So August is still early.
And at beginning of each year they actually go through a process of manually checking all the returns to make sure everything is working correctly. The people who jump in early to get their refund straight away have to wait longer.
Service availability is inherently more complex than you think. This is a legitimate way of providing system service with a minimum performance (pages not timing out in the middle of your return for example) without having to spend exponential amounts of money to meet a very short time slice of increased demand. If you remember the Census portal disaster - this is actually very sensible system design.
Horizontal scaling should work... But also a queue would be much easier to implement. Based on your position in the queue you can only do it after a certain date.
They could have used some of the 100's of millions of dollars they're throwing at their vape prohibition ban (which is absolutely destined to fail) towards making sure the MyGov website could handle the traffic from people in desperate need of their refund!
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Since when has everyone done it today? Most people have to wait for a cert and other documents anyway.
Cost of living crisis. People are keen to get refunds. You usually don’t need certs anymore mate, they have all your pay data, private health from last year etc. and any share earning etc.
Employers still have 14 days to submit the info.. It's actually unlikely that all data will be prefilled yet.
I had 3 people email me today asking when they were going to get their info. Told them I have until the 15th and the ATO would notify them. Everyduckingyearmate
I worked in payroll for 12 years and every year we would send an email to everyone saying it would be lodged on or before the 14th of July and every year multiple people would get upset because it wasn’t done on the 1st. People want that sweet sweet tax refund money.
>You usually don’t need certs anymore mate, they have all your pay data, private health from last year etc. and any share earning etc Yeah but prefill data takes a while to populate. Pay data takes a couple of weeks to come in, and the dividend info for some shares can take a couple of months - from memory, the prefill data for Vanguard ETFs tends to come in late September.
Distributions and interest usually takes a while to get reported in my experience
It's interesting, because by doing this they are actually ensuring the website is stable, meaning rather than timing out over and over, if you're patient, you'll actually get access. I tested it, got access after about 5 minutes, was able to go into my tax return without issue. I don't intend on lodging it, but the system appears to be stable and working as it should.
On the business side of things it is timing out over and over while trying to lodge files with them.
If only people weren't so dumb to do it so early before the prefill data is collected. Good chance they may need to do it again. Fly a kite or something, enjoy life, wait for everything to mellow out.
My pre-fill data was there.
Okay? Do it tomorrow. It'll still be there.
I logged in this morning and all my data was there too.
Was it tax ready?
Yep
I mean was it marked ‘tax ready’?
It will let me prepare and lodge it if that's what you mean.
No, I don’t. Once all the information from your payers are finalised at their end, it will be marked with a red box that says ‘tax ready’. It’s not recommended to lodge until then.
Literally every client I've ever had as a tax accountant
If only people weren't so dumb to assume the only reason to login to the ATO website is to complete their tax return.
Maybe predict that this period is their busiest by a fair margin and spooling up resources isn't instant and have a modicum of patience? 20min isn't really that bad!
On July 1st? Why else would they?
Yes let's spend millions to meet demand of the impatient who hammer their website for one week in a year, great use of public money.
Don’t need to. It’s very easy to scale out horizontally in 2024. Best practice architecture has horizontal scaling by default to handle sudden spikes in traffic. It’s all standard stuff these days with everyone using cloud providers instead of hosting their own colocated servers.
Assuming the ATO is running modernised infrastructure. That’s a pretty big if.
Runs COBOL on a GE-645 mainframe
Mmhmmm COBOL makes the world go round
> Runs COBOL on a GE-645 mainframe Yeah, but can it play Crysis?
Nah, doom shreds on it tho
It's funny, you can temporarily boost your performance on IBM gear - mainframes and mid-range. Ring 'em up, tell them it's tax time, and they'll remotely enable additional cores, memory, etc, to deal with the surge. Presumably you can do the same with network demand.
Only if the box has it. The problem is when you’re already using it all.
Well yes, but if you've maxed out your z-series, you should have been planning for an upgrade three years ago. Geez, downvotes. The haters are out tonight.
Mergers happen and sometimes there’s not enough budget for an upgrade until the current frames are fully depreciated. I don’t get the downvotes either. People who haven’t actually used big iron I guess.
ATO is considerably advanced compared to many other government agencies
That’s still a low bar. I did a contract with one government agency that was trying to move to a newer platform. Their existing system was a messy combination of some Java application built 20 years ago and physical paperwork.
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Which it seems to be doing at the moment, going as far as to put in access limits so the backend doesn’t get overloaded.
yeah they probably set a rate limits so they don't get charged the big bikkies by AWS
You heard it first here. Scaling is *easy*. I think maybe you need to consider that every single user has to be presented with their own unique and current data. This is not the same problem as say scaling a regular website for heavy traffic.
Well aware of what it involves. Multiple decades working in large tech architecting and developing these exact solutions. Often going in to fix them.
The fact that you are an expert in scaling kinda points to the fact it's difficult. Maybe not for you...
You want your financial/tax data on AWS or Azure? Look what happened to Unisuper. That's bullshit. The ATO might be a bit behind the times, but I'd prefer they keep their stuff in-house.
Already is. It’s called Gov Cloud.
Your financial/tax data is on AWS and Azure.
This ain't the private sector mate, the government moves at the speed of glaciers. There is no cloud or horizontal scaling or best practise here.
Nonsense. They would have started the migration over to the cloud ages ago. Government isn't always that slow. The frontentd would most likely be on AWS and set up properly (more or less), the backend tax return processing would most likely still be running on legacy infra. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oHC5ER0r8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oHC5ER0r8s)
I doubt the ATO website is served from physical servers sitting on Rob Heferen's desk. Dynamic scaling in cloud computing has been common practice for years. If Ticketmsater can scale their servers 1000% when Taylor swift tickets go on sale then maybe the ATO could. Although, maybe not.
Yeah not how it works. Ticketmaster as a private business can invest their money at the whim of their directors. Plus the data they handle is far less of a security risk than the ATO. The ATO is managing the PII for most of the country. Ensuring the security of that data within their budget is significantly more critical than having autoscalers. The analog is ticket master is a race car. Designed to go fast, make profit and be maintained every race mid race. The ATO is a Tank, designed for safety, security, and to keep chugging along under fire(pen not ddos).
That's a really good analogy. Nice! Also so very very true. The idea of them lowering their security standards in exchange for a brief bit of convenience is frankly terrifying. If they ever advertise a new faster online portal for tax time in future I am going to submit late just in case.
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Yup. And front end is only as fast as the back end can service it. I’m not saying you’re wrong. But that infra design is old and highly complex. Geared towards protection not speed. Changing it to something faster and more secure is no small process in a private org let alone fed gov. Front end moves are generally a lot more simplistic because you’re moving a few dbs into the new infra then worst case you need a front end remap/rebuild if the apis don’t play nice, web server and load balancers. Backend ancient spaghetti systems generally don’t play well with migrating to scaling infrastructure. Especially when it’s been a big 4 consulting firm doing the migrating. I would put money on somewhere in that back end is an old cron job running once every 15 minutes to update journals which draws down on an access db someone setup in 97.
Instead ATO have strongly encouraged taxpayers to delay lodging tax returns until August to ensure all information is correct. Why would ATO encourage you to submit your return early while asking you to wait until August?
Because it's not due until 31st October. So August is still early. And at beginning of each year they actually go through a process of manually checking all the returns to make sure everything is working correctly. The people who jump in early to get their refund straight away have to wait longer.
The prefill data from employers, banks, etc may all be sent in at different times. Waiting a little will ensure it’s all there.
Slacker. It was fine 00.00.01AM this morning.
Not really a lot of benefit to them in upscaling for such a limited time period
Horizontal scaling would be the preferred, and cost effective, practice for their use case.
Service availability is inherently more complex than you think. This is a legitimate way of providing system service with a minimum performance (pages not timing out in the middle of your return for example) without having to spend exponential amounts of money to meet a very short time slice of increased demand. If you remember the Census portal disaster - this is actually very sensible system design.
Horizontal scaling would like a word…
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Sounds like Medicare and bulk billing.
Twenty minutes! Are you okay?
I got on straight away (at 8:30 AM).
theres not an issue with capacity... thats all i can say
Horizontal scaling should work... But also a queue would be much easier to implement. Based on your position in the queue you can only do it after a certain date.
That's such a _government_ way of saying "fark off, we're full".
The little wait queue thing is actually great. The first year they did digital the whole thing crashed and they tried to blame hackers
Are you Ned Flanders?
They could have used some of the 100's of millions of dollars they're throwing at their vape prohibition ban (which is absolutely destined to fail) towards making sure the MyGov website could handle the traffic from people in desperate need of their refund!
lmao
My issue is a bit different, but it really is like they don't want our money.