IRD cleans up online tax

By PETER GRIFFIN

The successor to ir-File, Inland Revenue's scrapped system for online filing of payroll records, will be pitched to thousands of small and medium-sized businesses next month in a bid to restore confidence in the Government's online taxation plans.

The revamped version has been operational since February, processing about 16,000 PAYE schedules a month from 12,000 registered employers.

But the department has been cautious in extending the service to a further 160,000 employers, fearing a repeat of compatibility problems that left thousands of users unable to file returns.

Bryre Patchell, manager of the department's business direct unit, said the new, bug-free system could already handle the 50,000 users the Government wanted to have filing online by June 2004, but take-up would be staggered so that help-desk support could keep up with demand.

"We have to balance the ability to bring new users on with the ability to meet their service requirements," he said.

Gone are the digital certificates and plug-ins that formed the backbone of ir-File's authentication system but conflicted with some versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer web browsers and would not run on non-Windows operating systems.

Mr Patchell said the department decided to abandon ir-File last August because it was having "devastating effects on people's networks."

"The way we deployed it relied on digital certificates for authentication and non-repudiation, but we had a great deal of difficulty across the user-spectrum with getting that stuff deployed onto people's desktops."

The digital certificates were designed to sit on an employer's PC along with an application written in Microsoft's Active X technology, which attached a signature as the monthly payroll data was sent.

The problem, which Mr Patchell said was partly due to many employers using cutdown versions of Explorer and Netscape that could not accept the digital certificates, is absent from the new system.

"We now have the type of authentication used in online banking - a user name and password," he said.

"We still use 128-bit encryption and we send digital receipts to businesses when they submit the information online."

Electronic Data Systems (EDS), the company that developed the ir-File system in early 1999, has been out of the picture altogether in the development of the new version.

The department developed ir-File2 from scratch internally in less than four months.

While the cost of getting the original ir-File off the ground has never been revealed, the new system is budgeted to cost $4.7 million, including software licence fees for the first year.

Running on Sun Enterprise 22OR servers, ir-File2 has front-end user screens written in HTML/PERL with an Oracle database running on Unix.

Also receiving a revamp is the department's website, which receives an average of 150,000 hits a day.

"At the moment it's not very conducive to Joe Public coming in and trying to find stuff. It's words on screen rather than stuff that should be written for the web," said Mr Patchell.

But while employers will soon be able to browse their tax records online, there are no immediate plans to extend the system to private users filing tax returns from home.

"It's explicitly there for employers to send us their monthly payroll data."

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