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An e-Gov scheme delivering online tax forms and “Tell Us Once” systems to stop duplication of change-of-address forms to each States department could be delivered within a year – but States’ bureaucracy is holding it back, according to the Island’s top IT expert.
Mark Loane, the Chief Executive Officer of C5 Alliance, says that the delays and failure with the cost-cutting e-Gov scheme shows up “lots of faults in government, and the civil service in general”.
His comments come in the lead feature in the May edition of the free business magazine Connect, in which he says that the £130 million deficit in States finances is starting to focus minds within the public sector on e-Gov.
The feature also includes interviews with the two civil servants who have taken over the stalled project, and a timeline showing six occasion in the last two-and-a-half years in which senior States figures have claimed the project was about to begin. All of those timelines have been missed.
Mr Loane – whose C5 Alliance firm specialises in e-Gov-type projects for major international firms – says that the project that would make life easier for Islanders and businesses and cut out unnecessary duplication and waste within the States, is within reach.
He said: “The speed barrier to e-Gov is not the technology, it’s going to be about the people and the culture and the business processes. It’s the bureaucracy, not the technology.
“In 12 months we could put in place the enterprise architecture – this communication between siloed systems and departments, the back-end systems.
“We could achieve a log-in and Citizen ID, and they could achieve certain exemplars such as a ‘Tell Us Once’ system and online tax forms. We could achieve at least phase one of a good, well-implemented online tax system which would allow some pre-population of data [so that forms are mostly filled in automatically].
“We have got to have good authentication so that the citizen can be logged in securely. We can then target some of the key hard transactions – those things that cause citizens the most pain, so forms that they have to fill in, such as the housing forms, which could be pre-populated and much more accessible.
“All of that is readily achievable within 12 months.”
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