VOC Vocus Group Limited

CANBERRA, Australia—International Business Machines Corp. is negotiating a settlement with Australia's government over a bungled effort to oversee the country's first online census, senior executives said Tuesday.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics paid IBM 9.7 million Australian dollars (US$7.4 million) to oversee technical preparations and software used for the census, which was knocked offline for 40 hours on Aug. 9 following a series of small-scale denial of service attacks from an unidentified location overseas.

Kerry Purcell, managing director of IBM's operations in Australia and New Zealand, told a parliamentary inquiry looking into the failure that subcontractor Nextgen Networks was mainly responsible for the failure that knocked out the census website, along with ISP provider Vocus Communications.

But IBM accepted responsibility as the prime contractor, he said, and had begun talks with Australia's Treasury Department on a confidential settlement over the outage, estimated to have cost Australian taxpayers at least A$30 million dollars.

"We are looking to constructively resolve the matter as soon as possible," Mr. Purcell said. "I am confident we'll be able to achieve some kind of outcome in the very near future."

Write to Rob Taylor at rob.taylor@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 25, 2016 00:45 ET (04:45 GMT)

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