ATO's second commissioner for IT, Greg Farr said release one, which ended last year, was about underpinning the right technologies and rolling out Siebel CRM to contact-center staff.

Now with release two due for completion in December, a single view of all people who deal with the ATO has become available since July 17. Farr said the tax office has also revamped its document management systems to capture and image all incoming letters and faxes so they can pass through the workflow system and be accessible by Siebel.

"We had initial problems with workflow, but now we're well and truly on track," Farr said. "We've always had the intention of having a single, customer-facing suite of systems. Tax has really suffered, from since I can remember, a lack of integration."The ATO has seven accounting systems and is burdened by different processing systems for different tax types so the ability to get the single view of consumer is the top priority.

"Integration of CRM with the case management system was always very attractive to us," Farr said, adding the system is coping well with the number of transactions being put through it.

Release two will be deployed to an additional 700 staff this week and some 12,000 to 15,000 staff will be using it by December.