The Australian Taxation Office is reportedly planning to spend at least four years improving its core IT infrastructure as it seeks to overcome the effects of its recent woeful IT failures.

The IT systems improvement program represents a “significant shift” in the organisation’s IT strategy, the ATO said in documents published late last week.

Its plan involves strengthening its core IT platforms along with a renewed focus on resiliency, “through a concerted effort to simplify the underlying architecture”.

It will also involve porting more of ATO’s technology to the cloud.

Underlining this point, the ATO says three of its top eight applications are now running in the cloud.

Also, “we plan to refresh some of the core IT infrastructure assets to a more contemporary standard,” the tax office said. It added that this move should reduce “the inherent risk associated with legacy infrastructure failure.”