WRITTEN ON April 15th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Richard Clayton, treasurer of the splendidly combative Internet think tank FIPR, writes privately about the reality of e-government: see below.

The Inland Revenue has provided “online filing” of various forms for
some time. This is a mixture of accepting uploaded files from
accountancy packages and the provision of web forms.

Besides tax filing for individuals, there’s been some considerable
effort put into automating the annual submission of forms relating to
PAYE and National Insurance by employers.

A “secure email” system is also provided for employers — you get an
“insecure” email to your normal address advising you of a message (but
giving almost no details as to what it might be), which you can then
view properly once you gave logged on to a “secure” website (by
providing a rather obscure reference number and your chosen password).

This year there is a significant difference to this system.

Larger employers (>250 people) MUST now submit their annual forms online
and smaller companies are being bribed (250 quid) for doing so. Over the
next few years the definition of “large” will decrease (as will the
bribes) until by about 2010 all employers are using the online system.

Not surprisingly, this year’s combination of compulsion and bribes means
that a great many employers are using the site – far more than in
previous years – and, perhaps not surprisingly, it is failing to cope 🙁

So they’re using the resources for the secure webmail system to assist:

http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/ebu/mailbox.htm

– -==-=-=-=-

SECURE MAILBOX

We are very sorry that our Secure Mailbox service has either been
unavailable or restricted since 4 April. You are not affected if your
payroll software downloads information straight from your Mailbox. If it
does, you can get access to your mail even when the Mailbox is switched
off.

The mailbox is available from 2:00pm to midnight for the rest of this
week and everyone can access mail during these times.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience that the temporary closure of
the Mailbox may be causing you.

We will review the situation at the weekend and will let you have the
latest news on this page as soon as we can.

– -==-=-=-=-

which is all very well… but if you’re a small business employer (as
FIPR is) and you’ve been sent a secure email and the mailbox isn’t
available even in the late evening (whatever it may claim about
midnight) then this is really rather frustrating….

Annoyed of Cambridge

The Wibbi

Would it not be better if

(a) if the Government (or the companies they pay to do the donkey work)
were a little bit better at estimating demand.

Consideration of the effectiveness of bribes in producing step
changes in the level of usage might be desirable. A huge rise in
uptake this year surely cannot be all that surprising !

(b) if they realised that removing a communications service (the
mailboxes) in order to keep another service running merely ensures that
the pain is spread around (and disrupts even more processes).

Extending the deadline for filing by a few weeks (perhaps just for
smaller companies?) would also have smoothed the demand; albeit the
pain would have fallen on the Treasury rather than business.

(c) if they didn’t assume that everyone worked office hours and so
making systems unavailable in the small hours was actually disruptive.

Though their explanation seems a little strange; surely ALL demand
for bandwidth and processing power is low at 3am, and so keeping the
mailbox machines offline merely looks like an inability to pay the
overtime to get a sysadmin to reconfigure the system at 6am rather
than late in the evening.