Australian Taxation Office expands Canberra headquarters with 800 new roles

The Australian Taxation Office will consolidate its Canberra operations into an expanded headquarters at Civic and establish a new analytics and digital capability centre that will house 800 additional positions, the largest single expansion of ATO Canberra operations since the office moved to its current building in the early 2000s.

The consolidation, which will bring together staff currently spread across leased offices in the City, Greenway, and Lyneham precincts, will occur progressively over two years as fit-out works are completed in the upgraded Civic building. The new analytics centre will focus on data science, AI model development, and fraud detection capabilities that the ATO has identified as central to its transformation program.

ATO Commissioner Rob Heferen said the analytics capability build was the cornerstone of the office's five-year technology transformation plan, designed to shift the agency from manual compliance processes toward data-driven risk identification and automated compliance checking. "We serve 16 million individual taxpayers and 4 million businesses. Operating at that scale requires the most sophisticated data systems in the federal government," he said.

The 800 new positions include data scientists, software engineers, machine learning specialists, and policy analysts. The ATO will source talent from the APS graduate program, university partnerships with ANU and the University of Canberra, and the open employment market. Competitive salaries relative to the APS classification midpoints have been approved to attract candidates with in-demand technology skills.

The ACT government welcomed the expansion, noting that the technology roles would diversify Canberra's public service employment base toward higher-skilled positions in growing demand.

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