Yahoo Finance ATO blocked calls leave Aussies frustrated: ‘Constantly hung up on’
One in four calls to the ATO are being blocked, with some Aussies saying they have spent days trying to reach the agency.
Aussies seeking help from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) say they have been hung up on and have spent days trying to speak to someone from the government agency.
One in four Aussies who call the ATO are having their calls rejected, with more than 1 million calls blocked already this financial year.
Before being hung up on, customers receive an automated message telling them: “Our service is currently experiencing peak demand and we are unable to answer your call at this time.”
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Carol has been trying to contact the ATO for a week to sort out a business issue she and her mum are having. She said she’d been left frustrated after being “constantly hung up on”.
“I would have happily done it through our accountant or self-help or online, except that, for our particular issue, the ATO site tells us to contact the ATO directly to have this resolved,” Carol told Yahoo Finance.
“I have a four-month-old and two in school, and I have a broken foot and my mum lives 45 minutes away.”
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Carol said she and her mum planned to ring again this afternoon but there was “no guarantee that we will get through to the ATO”.
Other Aussies have taken to the ATO’s social media page to complain about the long wait times. One person said he had also been trying for a week to contact the agency and had waited an hour and 40 minutes only to be hung up on.
ATO responds
The ATO said 26 per cent of all inbound calls received this financial year had been “blocked” as a way to manage demand.
“Call blocking is used reservedly and intermittently to maintain client wait times at acceptable levels that ensures all calls in [the] queue could be answered by the end of each day,” an ATO spokesperson told Yahoo Finance. “It is standard industry practice in call centres to use call blocking.”
The ATO said it was experiencing “year-on-year increases” across phone and processing workloads.
“A deliberate decision was made mid-last year to put additional resources into reducing processing workloads, which has seen significant reductions in processing and wait times for taxpayers. We are continually reviewing how to balance this and minimise impact on clients,” the spokesperson said.
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The ATO encouraged people to use its self-serve options to save time and noted it offered a call-back service across most general queues, which was switched on and off during the day.
By the end of February, the ATO had answered 3.3 million general inbound calls with an average waiting time of 12 minutes and 19 seconds. However, the average wait does not factor in calls blocked.
The ATO noted the number of calls blocked did not represent the number of unique clients blocked.
“When call blocking is applied, clients tend to attempt to call multiple times in quick succession,” the spokesperson said.
Centrelink customers also face long waits
The ATO isn’t the only government agency under fire for long wait times. Centrelink recipients have also reported they have been struggling to get through over the phone.
One Queensland resident told Yahoo Finance he had tried to get through to Centrelink for more than a month, only to be hung up on and left waiting for hours at a time.
Just over 7.4 million calls - or 16.5 per cent - made to Centrelink over the first six months of the financial year were met with a congestion message. A further 2.3 million calls were terminated by a customer.
