Under the old rules, which applied until last year, the taxpayer had to file accounts by the end of September if HM Revenue and Customs were working out the amount due, and by the end of the following January if the taxpayer, or more usually an accountant, was providing the calculations already complete.
It didn’t really matter if the tax return was filled in on paper or online.
This year, however, the deadline for the paper returns is the end of this month.
Anyone completing the form online has until the end of January.
It’s an interesting move, partly because on January 31 this year the HMRC website (www.hmrc.gov.uk) crashed, forcing it to extend the deadline. It’s claimed that the system will be more robust next time.
It’s just one of several recent developments in UK e-government. Perhaps the most dramatic was the decision to trim down the 160 or so Government websites to just three.
The three ‘mega sites’ are www.businesslink.gov.uk for businesses, www.direct.gov.uk for individuals, and www.nhs.uk for health. At the moment they operate as gateways to the relevant departments.
Not all the material from the other sites has yet been transferred, but the aim is to do so by 2011. Already, certain functions are much more efficient.
A service called Namecheck enables you to check new names for brands or businesses against the registers at Companies House and the Intellectual Property Office simultaneously. Until now that would have involved visits to two separate sites.
The United Nations Public Administration Network (www.unpan.org) has published a report on e-government readiness around the world in 2008.
The UK is 10th in the league table; Ireland is 19th. Sweden is top, closely followed by Denmark and then Norway. The US comes in at fourth place.
The least prepared region in the world is west Africa. See the full report at http://tinyurl.com/634zh4.
So how does a country make it to the top of the list?
Well, in terms of contact between governments and businesses, the difference is clear.
According to the European Commission’s Eurostat service, 31% of businesses in the UK engage in online transactions with the Government.
That includes activities such as completing VAT returns or submitting tenders for contracts. The figure in Sweden is 90%. Another example can be seen in income tax declaration. Far more people in Sweden and Denmark use the online system, thanks to its simplicity.
Instead of taking a complex self-assessment scheme and putting it online, as the UK has done, the Nordic countries have a ‘one-touch’ arrangement. To accept the state’s calculation, all you have to do is press one button. It can even be done by text message.
As long ago as 2000, citizens in Hong Kong were able to obtain digital certificates for use in every online transaction with the Government.
Hong Kong also has a beautifully simple site that enables businesses and citizens to go straight to the service they need. See it at www.gov.hk/en/business.
This citizen-centric approach is the common thread in all successful e-government systems.
Interestingly, Northern Ireland is making some remarkable strides of its own in delivering excellent public services.
Eircom NI is currently delivering Network NI, the technological foundation on which many other service improvement programmes are being built and the NI citizen will soon experience the benefits of this in their daily interaction with government.
Network NI is a significant project modernising the internal NICS back office systems and provides the building blocks towards improved citizen facing services such as NI Direct.
The NI Direct project will enable people to contact any department or agency by calling a single telephone number, rather than the current situation of making at least one call per separate function of government.
As well as enabling a more efficient service delivery, it addresses one of the key problems in providing e-government — namely that some of the people who most need government services don’t currently own a computer.
Hence the NI Direct project is one aspect of e-government in which Northern Ireland is setting the pace.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Darren Lemon
Quelle/Source: Belfast Telegraph, 20.10.2008
