Users vexed by network congestion and download delays when filing their tax returns online last year won’t experience the same problem again—at least this is what Malaysia’s Inland Revenue Board (IRB) has promised.
By STAFF WRITER
ComputerWorld Malaysia

Users vexed by network congestion and download delays when filing their tax returns online last year won’t experience the same problem again—at least this is what Malaysia’s Inland Revenue Board (IRB) has promised.

In an interview, IRB said it has acted on user complaints to provide better public services with a recent IT (information technology) system upgrade and workflow re-engineering.

“We have conducted an extensive post-mortem and taken remedial action on all the major problems encountered last year,” the tax agency’s chief executive officer Hasmah Abdullah told Computerworld Malaysia.

“We have substantial funding under the Ninth Malaysian Plan to upgrade our IT facilities whenever the need arises,” she said, declining to disclose recent investments.

In 2006, poor system and bandwidth allocation resulted in network congestion, with a large number of people failing to submit their tax returns electronically.

Since then, the government agency has taken steps to increase bandwidth and system processing power “to cater to the need of last minute e-filers”, said Hasmah.

As an indication of its preparedness, she noted that less than 20 per cent of IRB’s server capacity is used and storage utilisation currently stands at 10 per cent.

The agency said it has collected more than 65,000 online submissions as of 4 April. This is more than six times the number received a year ago.

Hasmah expects the total number of online submissions to at least double that of last year’s—to more than 370,000 as the 30 April deadline draws near.

Process re-engineering

A significant amount of workflow streamlining has also taken place at IRB.

For instance, last year, taxpayers had to collect their e-filing personal identification number (PIN) at an IRB office before they could e-file their taxes.

Responding to public feedback, the agency now prints the PIN on the tax return forms that it mails to the homes of taxpayers, eliminating a trip to the IRB office.

“Unfortunately, we are unable to provide the PIN online. We need to authenticate the taxpayer,” Hasmah said. “Providing identification and tax reference numbers alone are not good enough as the information can be obtained from other sources.”

To shorten the time spent online, IRB’s system now does not require taxpayers to type in their tax reference number and address, as such information will be automatically retrieved from the tax agency’s internal database when users log in with their identification and PIN.

Hasmah also noted that IRB is continually improving its disaster recovery system to protect taxpayers’ data.

System and data backups are done daily, she said.

“One copy of backup data is kept in the data centre and another one is shipped to an offsite data vault to preserve vital records.”