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Australia's botched online census to cost taxpayers more than 23 million USD

Xinhua, October 20, 2016 Adjust font size:

The head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has profusely apologized for the nation's botched online census, which he said will cost taxpayers more than 23 million U.S dollars to fix.

In August, the ABS attempted to hold the nation's first ever online national survey, but it was taken offline after the website suffered a number of coordinated Denial of Service (DoS) cyber-attacks.

Speaking to the Senate estimates hearing overnight, the ABS's David Kalisch thanked the Australian public for attempting to complete the census when the service came back online, but admitted the cost of fixing the issue would creep into the tens of millions of dollars bracket.

Kalisch said the move to an online census from a paper-based survey intended to save around 75 million U.S dollars, but the process of bringing down the system and then troubleshooting and rebooting it would likely cost 23 million U.S dollars, bringing net savings to less than 55 million U.S dollars.

"We have to date probably incurred additional costs of around 15 million U.S dollars and we anticipate possibly spending another eight million U.S dollars," Kalisch told the Senate estimates overnight.

"We made a difficult decision to take the system off line on August 9 to ensure the security of census data, but we should not have got to that point, and the system should have been robust to denial of service events."

He said more preparation could have gone into the nation's first online national snapshot.

"The ABS tested the patience and commitment of many households especially through the difficulties accessing the call center and the unavailability of the census online form for nearly two days," Kalisch said.

"The ABS made a number of poor judgments in our preparation for the 2016 census that led to the poor service experienced by many households. I apologize to the community on behalf of the ABS and I repeat that apology sincerely again today."

Despite the botched survey, more than 96 percent of Australian households filled it out before the extended deadline. Endit