Medibank still struggling with data migration headache

Health insurer Medibank Private is still struggling to get tax statements out to its customers following issues with the migration of user data as part of its $150 million technology overhaul.

Medibank informed customers a month ago that it wouldn't be able to send out users' annual statements by its July 15 deadline, and could not provide a date for when the documents would be received.

It meant Medibank Private customers were forced to wait indefinitely to submit their annual returns to the Australian Tax Office.

The data migration glitch is understood to be one of the drivers behind the ATO's call for Australians to wait until August to file, when it has most of the data it needs to pre-fill tax forms.

But one month on, the health insurer is yet to fully rectify the issue.

Late last week it said it had now processed more than 95 percent of member statements, after ramping up last week with 100,000 statements completed within a few days.

But there is "unfortunately .. still a small group of members" whose tax statements Medibank has so far been unable to resolve. It declined to provide detail for the remaining delay.

"We have proactively reached out to everyone in this remaining group by their preferred communication channel (SMS, email and mail)," Medibank advised.

It said it could not advise the remaining affected customers when their tax documents would be sent out.

"We’ll continue to provide updates as we progress and are working hard to resolve the issue," a spokesperson said.

Medibank is close to completing a $150 million repalcement of its core policy and CRM systems in partnership with integrator IBM and software provider SAP.

But it last month found itself unable to reconcile customer tax statements due to an unidentified issue with the migration of its member records to the new single, integrated software suite.

Medibank CEO Craig Drummond at the time called the delay to tax statement processing "unacceptable". The health insurer has provided an online form for customers to check whether they are affected.