In Tonga

eGovernment off to a blazing start

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa on May 31, 2007 3:24:09 PM

Revenue Services Department, elsewhere known as the blood sucking animal of Government or one of the two eventualities of life (death and taxes, but I'm not sure which one ?)

Revenue Services is pushing out a survey for their Consumption Tax 'partners' (those who earn enough to be taxed more) trying to get a feeling for how many would be willing to fill out their tax forms online.

Personally I would have hoped that Revenue would have had this in place for a few more meaningful (head-ache ridden sections) such as filling out those forms to get anything into the country.

But its a start.

Maybe next time you look into Tonga, all our Consumption Tax paying business will be submitting their forms online (except when they need the submission back-dated, so they'll take it in to the first cousin on their wife's best friend's mother's side.)

Go Tonga!!

Next in line we're really hoping they can get those Customs, Sales Tax forms when importing stuff. I remember doing a spreadsheet for a few people back in MS Excel 1997? 10 years later I'm still seeing people wasting their time with calculators for hours on end calculating all those weird taxes.

Hey, I was even giving away that spreadsheet and have come across people using the spreadsheet I didn't know. I'm pretty sure that we offered government the spreadsheet, purely because if they got their work done faster we could get our goods out faster too, and the same with everyone else.

As with any nice piece of work, it simplified the arduous problem of complicated calculations, while still printing out an exact duplicate of the official form (so officialdom could check with their calculators.) One major advantage is if the currency exchange rate changes (being as it is charged on the day you finally get to the front of the queue, not on the day you got into the queue) it takes you seconds to update your 'form' while it still takes the hour for Revenue to do their thing with the calculator and law book.

Of course, a less challenging option is something I promoted eons ago. Have KIOSKS available where people can view / print the latest Government Forms, Regulations that we have to submit manually anyway.

I'm sure some of the departments would make use of these kiosks to print out their own forms so they can distribute it to their walk-in clients, seeing as how many departments still have to submit print runs to the Government Press Tonga Print (ooops, it's an independent government body ??) Guess what happens when your budget's been blown by the back office ? At these kiosks people can get links to current versions of the law they are supposed to be following, and you don't have to have Internet connections since all this Tonga data can probably sit in less than 10G of PDFs.

Do the thinking, and you can have the PDF Forms available for filling online, as well as submissions and evaluation. That's with essentially no new fangled technology, the kiosk giving EVERYONE access to Tonga's eGovernment.

Nomoa.com

In Tonga

Modules

eGovernment off to a blazing start