ATO inks $119m SBR platform support deal with IBM

The Australian Taxation Office has extended its long-running partnership with IBM on the Standard Business Reporting (SBR) platform at a cost of $119 million.

The national revenue agency entered a new three-year contract with IBM for ongoing development and support of the platform earlier this month.

It is the largest contract to be signed by the pair since the ATO’s $158 million component of the whole-of-government deal with IBM in June 2018.

SBR was introduced in 2010 to simplify reporting by allowing businesses to transact directly with agencies using their business and accounting software.

The platform currently supports a range of day-to-day government processes like single touch payroll, as well as JobKeeper payments and superannuation reporting.

IBM said the platform, which it built specifically for the ATO, uses a number of products, including “IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, IBM MQ and IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale”.

The new contract will see the company “focus” the platform’s cloud native capability to “support the bulk of transactions that run through the platform”.

“There are over one billion of these transactions that take place between the ATO, businesses and superannuation funds each year in Australia,” the company added.

IBM A/NZ managing director Katrina Troughton said the contract would see the company focus on improving the current platform, including its resiliency and robustness.

“It’s our focus for the SBR platform to continue to support innovation and improve the current platform by enabling streamlined services to increase the resiliency and robustness of the SBR platform,” she said.

“IBM welcomes the opportunity to support the ATO and to continue to grow and build diverse teams that are working across all of our projects.”

Troughton added that the company was “thrilled to support the government's economic stimulus agenda and pandemic response in such a critical yet practical way.”