Errol Knight and Roland Booth, Contributors 
THE NEW tax site www. jamaicatax-online.gov.jm recently announced by Commerce, Science and Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell is a welcome step in the right direction.
It should certainly help citizens to meet their tax obligations without the excessive time wasting and dislocation currently experienced by battle weary taxpayers visiting any of the island's inland revenue collection offices.
Of course in today's cyber-world where hacking and phishing are now rampant, it is critical that before the general public begins accessing the site and placing their critical information on it, we are fairly confident that all practical steps have been taken to ensure the confidentiality of the site.
Small oversights in the business process may also present huge problems, such as penalties, interest charges and even prosecution to those who it is deemed have not made the payments because the linkage between the site and the manual parts of the organisation have not been tightened.
Here are some of our observations.
SECURITY
The forms are executable. A basic step used by any properly configured firewall will be to block executables. So either the forms will not be available to those who have reasonably secured connections, or those who do not will be exposing themselves to potential malware.
Pages with sensitive information (e.g. TRN number) do not expire immediately after submission. This allows hackers into page buffers and caches to access this information after the unsuspecting user has left the page.
The secure connection facility (SSL) is not activated until the user enters the payment section of the site. This should be invoked as soon as the user attempts to log on. The current setting allows the username and password to be sniffed out from the page transmission and available for reuse later.
USER FRIENDLY
There are a number of dead links (which lead nowhere) on the site.
The domain name should auto fill, i.e., one should be able to type jamaicatax-online. gov.jm instead of the full www.jamaica tax-online.gov.jm
Users of non-wintel platforms are overlooked in the experience, i.e., no linux or Macintosh users are facilitated.
Before proceeding to enter for payment, there should be on the first page of each section a listing of the documents, numbers, types of payment accepted (US$/J$ credit cards) that one will need to proceed e.g. TRN number, land valuation number etc.
Validation of the relevant identification number (e.g., TRN or land valuation number) should be done before the payment section is entered.
The forms should be filled on-screen instead of being downloaded. This is a more straight-forward approach for the average user, and is not susceptible to the security blocking issue raised earlier.
The following phrases, which may upset some users could be removed: 'add to today's tax total' and 'thanks for your contribution to national develop-ment' and be replaced with simple generic statements as 'continue', 'thanks for your payment'.
Forms require windows and therefore are not useable by Mac and linux users.
BUSINESS PROCESS
The receipt page does not show the user's name, therefore this cannot be used even as a temporary receipt.
The site says if a receipt is needed it must be requested from the inland revenue office. This is defeating the purpose. An official receipt should be emailed to the user.
Errol Knight is the technology manager of the Gleaner Company. Roland Booth is production manager at Gleaner Online.
