DOES ANYONE know of any local government unit (LGU) that is already offering their citizens the service of being able to pay their real property taxes online without going to the municipal hall of the city hall?
I ask this question because I have been involved in providing Real Property Tax Systems (RPTS) for LGUs for more than three decades and up to now, I have not heard of any LGU that has successfully deployed an RPTS online and I mean fully at 100%, and not just partially.
I was one of the consultants to the senators who sponsored the E-Commerce Act (ECA) in the year 2000, and that is why I am somehow familiar with the law.
As I recall, something went wrong when the Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR) were issued, because most LGUs at that time interpreted the term “online” to mean being deployed in a Local Area Network (LAN).
I have been managing LANs for about three decades now, and I know for a fact that “online” means being deployed on the cloud, and not in a LAN.
Right now, I am planning a fully online RPTS for an LGU client, and our plan of course is to make it 100% online, such that the real property owner does not have to go to the municipal hall to pay his or her real property taxes.
As a matter of fact, he or she does not have to be physically present to pay those taxes, because he or she could even be abroad, for that matter.
Admittedly, the computation of the tax dues still has to be done manually, but everything already becomes online as soon as the computations are done. In layman terms, I would describe the system to be cloud based and browser based, meaning that the property owner could use any computing device, any operating system and any web browser to be able to transact with the municipal hall.
Technically speaking, I think that being 100% online is the correct interpretation of “digitalization” as defined by PBBM. It is not enough to “digitalize” a system if it is only accessible via a LAN.
In fairness to those who are not used to transacting online, they could still go to the municipal hall to transact over the counter, using a computer that will be operated by a teller./PN
