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The House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee has recently published its report, E-Revenue, which draws three main conclusions.
* Although the Revenue should have all of its services available electronically by its target date of 2005, it is unlikely to achieve its target 50 per cent take-up. To do this will require easier use, greater incentives and an improvement in user confidence.
* New systems need to be tested more systematically; teething problems sap public confidence.
The House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee has recently published its report, E-Revenue, which draws three main conclusions.
* Although the Revenue should have all of its services available electronically by its target date of 2005, it is unlikely to achieve its target 50 per cent take-up. To do this will require easier use, greater incentives and an improvement in user confidence.
* New systems need to be tested more systematically; teething problems sap public confidence.
* There should be no compromise on the need to develop rigorous business cases for the services and their strategy to identify relative costs and benefits.
Concerns raised in the report are that although the Inland Revenue is spending £200 million on its Internet service, it does not appear to know why the take-up rate is slow. The reports suggests that this is because the self-assessment service 'offers insufficient added value'.
The Revenue needs to finalise its evaluations of products delivered since June 2001 to see what lessons can be learned.
Nor does the Revenue 'have a full grip of the costs or potential savings for each e-service or its overall e-strategy'. The report quotes the e-Envoy's comment that 'there is no point having services on-line which people do not use'.
Also, rather worryingly, the report records that the Revenue had invited the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency to test the external security of its system and had received positive assurance that the site was secure. The report goes on to note that in May 2002 (after the Committee took evidence in March) the Revenue had to halt operation when users reported seeing information about other taxpayers.
A full copy of the report can be found on the House of Commons website at:
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmpubacc.htm. Alternatively it can be purchased for £10 from The Stationery Office.
