ATO to release $100m apps tender

The Australian Taxation Office is set to release a tender for IT application services, seeking a panel of providers to develop and maintain applications included in the agency's standard operating environment.

The tender, to be released in mid-August, will establish a panel of service providers the ATO will use for the next three years, with two extension options of 12 months each.

The ATO expects the tender to result in over $100 million of work.

The Tax Office said it would release an RFT "for the provision of a broad range of professional IT Application Services... for the purpose of supporting ATO's future information technology program of work."

Each service provider on the panel will be expected to sign a deed of agreement with the ATO.

These contracts may prove more lucrative for IT service providers should other government agencies choose to engage with them under the same terms, under 'piggy-back' provisions.

The ATO has said that while the panel will primarily be put together to "meet the needs of the ATO, it is intended that this panel will include 'piggy-back' provisions and will be made available to other agencies upon request."

"The 'piggy-back' provision will allow all other Commonwealth agencies, upon request and approval, to access the Services provided under the resulting Standing Offer Arrangement as long as certain criteria are met," an ATO spokesman said in a written statement.

The ATO is yet to decide whether it would place geographical limits on where application development and maintenance work is sourced from under the tender.

Many of Australia's banks have outsourced application maintenance to Indian offshoring centres, but the practice is often met with opposition from unions.