ATO extends tax return deadline after MyGov glitches

The Australian Tax Office has given taxpayers an extra day to file their annual returns after technical issues with the MyGov site locked lodgers out of the platform yesterday.

Intermittent issues affecting the Department of Human Services-run MyGov platform yesterday meant many users were unable to file their tax return by the October 31 deadline.

Those attempting to lodge began complaining of an inability to access the site mid-afternoon.

The Tax Office advised via Twitter at around 6pm that MyGov appeared to be back up and running.

It said no penalties would apply to those forced to lodge their tax return on November 1 as a result of the technical issues.

Department of Human Services general manager Hank Jongen said the outage had only lasted for 10 minutes, despite customers claiming to have been locked out of MyGov for several hours.

Taxpayers wishing to lodge their returns online through the ATO's MyTax are required to do so through the MyGov platform.

MyGov provides single sign-on for a range of government transactions, including tax returns.

It's not the first time MyGov has struggled during peak tax time - in 2014, the first year online tax lodgers were required to go through the portal, technical issues plagued the platform for a week.

The ATO's MyTax platform became taxpayers' sole option for lodging tax returns online after the agency got rid of its 15-year-old E-Tax software in June.

It is expecting 3 million lodgements to be made on the platform in the 2016 tax year.