Things are not going so well for the HMRC website, which is still experiencing problems. If it is not up and running soon, perhaps we citizens should invoice the tax-man £100 each for the hassle this will cause us.
It is admirable, I suppose, that the government at least attempts to engage with new technology. However, its approach is too ‘twentieth century’ for my liking. The kind of services it provides are what web developers would call Web 1.0 – that is, they resemble the very first generation of web services. Such services were (and in the HMRC case, still are) simply a direct electronic metaphors for other forms of communication. In the case of the tax return, you fill in the boxes in exactly the same way in which you would do so with a pen and paper… only it takes longer to do it online. You cannot make links with information from other places. Even if you have written or typed or calculated your figures elsewhere, you will still have to retype them into the governments forms.
This is quite inefficient. One great benefit of IT, is that one should never, ever have to type anything twice. Once an address exists in an electronic format somewhere, it should be possible to send that information elsewhere, without having to retype it. It is a measure of how small our technological steps are, that many people I know (and, dear reader, many people you know) still retype data, from one programme to another, and from one device to another. Even copying-and-pasting should be redundant by now (in favour of, say, drag-and-drop or even import/export), but still we persist with these old methods.
All that is required is a common format for data, that different types of computer (be it a PC, a laptop, a mobile phone, or a departmental number-cruncher) can read and understand. Sadly, this standardisation process is not yet complete. In the meantime, governments and companies each have to ask you for your data separately, so they can put it in their format and store it on their database. Continue reading