Tax officials working from home have encountered lags and disconnections as their employer hones technology letting it shift thousands of staff from the workplace in response to COVID-19.
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The Australian Taxation Office told staff some were having IT issues as they used a system allowing them to work remotely.
In an email to staff, ATO chief operating officer Jacqui Curtis and the COVID Response Committee's Jeremy Geale said the agency was planning solutions to the problem.
"We know how frustrating this can be and are working hard to improve the platform's performance and reliability as quickly as possible," the email said.
Ms Curtis and Mr Geale advised staff to try working around the issues, including by lowering their screen resolution and by avoiding screen sharing.
"Whatever you can do on your own computer's browser the better, as opposed to the browser in a Remote Desktop Access session," they said.
"Any online streaming, such as watching videos, must be done through your own computer's browser rather than in an RDA session."
The email also suggested staff talk to their team and manager about splitting work days to start earlier or end later in the day to avoid the 10am-2pm peak window.
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An ATO spokesperson said slowness and connectivity issues had affected a small percentage of staff.
"But this has become a lot less frequent as we have increased our own network capacity and tuned the remote working solutions," the spokesperson said.
"We are also finding a few issues with local internet connectivity for some staff in remote working locations - this is beyond the control of either the individual or ATO.
"As many organisations have transitioned their staff to work from home, public internet and telephony infrastructure and cloud collaboration platforms usage have seen significant growth, and this has caused some performance and connectivity issues for our staff."
The IT problems had not stopped the ATO from delivering services for the community, and technical support was available for staff who raised the issues, the spokesperson said.
Australian Services Union official Jeff Lapidos, representing ATO employees, said staff were finding it frustrating as the system dropped out or was slow while they worked from home.
About 11,000 ATO staff - more than half the agency's workforce - have started working remotely.
The agency has shifted staff from the workplace in response to the coronavirus while receiving the crucial task of delivering economic stimulus to keep workers in jobs.
Two thousand more tax officials made the move to work-from-home arrangements since Friday, when 9000 were working remotely.
The Tax Office is yet to determine the peak number of employees it anticipates will work from home as it moves staff from office buildings as a precaution against COVID-19 infections.
"Working from home continues to be implemented where it is operationally possible, while still supporting continued delivery of services to the community during this challenging time," the agency spokesperson said.
Public service commissioner Peter Woolcott on Tuesday said the federal bureaucracy was taking a "deliberate and phased" approach to working from home.
- For information on COVID-19, please go to the ACT Health website or the federal Health Department's website.
- You can also call the Coronavirus Health Information Line on 1800 020 080
- If you have serious symptoms, such as difficulty breathing, call Triple Zero (000)
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