Costly, under-featured MyGov is just fine, says Oz national auditor

The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has rubber-stamped the government's MyGov portal, in spite of cost-overruns and a lack of performance metrics. The cost blowout was impressive: from an original four-year budget of AU$29.7 million (approved by the previous government in 2012), the project actually spent nearly triple …

[Diogenes]

This year will pay to avoid it to lodge tax

Did the eTax thing through mygov last year, it was so painful that I will pay good money to avoid doing it again and lodging through a tax agent - despite my tax affairs being very simple (1 employer, no investments, @1k in deductions)

[Anonymous Coward]

Just ring up and request a paper form

I will be doing this as long as it is available.

They will ask why you don't use MyGov.

My answer:

I'm locked out of my account, by no fault of my own, and I won't be creating a new one.

[CentralCoasty]

Re: Just ring up and request a paper form

Agreed.

And I have better things to do with my time than struggle through the inept pile of festering mess that myGov is..... I'm sticking to paper and my local tax guy - so sad.

I just love it when they come up with these big number savings....

"We saved $40M" they chortle....

".... great... how?"

" Ah.. by doing higher value work now we are not having to spend time talking to the public " they reply....

"uhm... but if you didnt do it before and no-one complained, why do you need to do it now?"

Now if they FIRED public servants to the tune of $40M THEN I would believe the savings.... but somehow I think the only people that are no longer there are the project team.......

[Anonymous Coward]

eTax is not MyGov

myGov is not much more than the single-signon front-end to government internet services.

etax, centrelink and all the other wonderful interactions one can have with government departments are separate.

Using Centrelink for data validation? Is the word I am looking for "oxymoron"?

[Paulaseagull]

MyGov accounts

The reason there are so many more accounts than anticipated would be the number of times the platform has stuffed up and required a single user to re register. I've done it 3 times. Ridiculously ineffective and inefficient. Crested and maintained ineptly.

[Denarius]

Why would you expect otherwise

when the craven colonial brown nosing creeps comprising the senior pubic(sic) service and the spin doctors for the oligopolists that own all 4 major parties admire a similar pommie disaster instead of an adult in charge asking the First Question. "What problem are you trying to solve?" Second question should be "Why is your solution better than existing process ? Verifiable figures only accepted"

What passes for Oz cabinet may have high IQs but I see no evidence that any of them have any wisdom. Their hired advisors seem to be in thrall to techno-utopians of the gullible or authoritarian kind.

OffTopic: What happened to FOTW ?

[dbannon]

It cannot help but appear good on some mertics

"an increase in transactions completed online; a reduction in in-person contacts with citizens; "

You should always choose metrics you cannot loose on. Such as the above. You walk into a Medicare office and someone meets you at the door and says "go home and do that on line". So, clearly inline transactions will increase, in-person ones will decrease. Most of these transactions are government payout related and overall, they will decrease too as many people will just give up.

Its a difficult to logon, clunky system. It lets you proceed, laboriously, through a process and then says, "oh, no, you need the phone app to do this".

I assume they hope to use it to process CentreLink stuff, a good number of CentreLink people struggle with computers, often change mobile phone numbers (necessary for logon) and generally don't respond to more barriers. But I guess thats the intention.