IfG.CC - The Institute for eGovernment

Nearly 300,000 companies will no longer have to pay to file annual returns online with the Companies Office, Commerce Minister Margaret Wilson announced today.

The cost of filing an online annual return, currently $15, will be eliminated from July 1. About 295,800 companies are expected to benefit.

“It is great that a New Zealand company, Datacom, has been selected to provide the infrastructure for this all-of-government authentication solution – a solution that is unique to New Zealand, and one with privacy at its core," Trevor Mallard said.

Councils should start to "walk the talk" on delivery of e-services, says LGOL chairman Rod Titcombe, himself a council chief executive. He cites research released last year that found only 15 per cent of councils have formal strategies to build e-government services.

Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) plans to launch a local government web site have upset the incumbent Local Government Online, which last week relaunched its enhanced portal.

The DIA site will present central government information, most significantly from Statistics New Zealand. “The rest will be links and civics information about how local government and central government interact,” says spokesman Colin Feslier. “There will be some overlap but it would be perfectly appropriate if they link to our site.”

There is a fundamental “paradox” between digitally-enabled government and the New Public Management (NPM) philosophy which has become entrenched in New Zealand, says EDS’s Steve Griffin, keynote speaker at the Govis conference.

NPM, exemplified here by the reforms of the mid-1980s, concentrates on decentralisation and the separation of policy making from policy implementation, with the latter in the hands of relatively small, special-purpose agencies with a private-sector-like business style.

Confidentiality shrouds the New Zealand government’s work with preferred supplier Datacom on an acceptable centralised method of authenticating users of government services. In particular, e-government unit head Laurence Millar declines to say how firm the specification for the authentication scheme is, and how much detail work remains to be done.

While negotiations, expected to take until March, are in progress, “we are saying nothing more than the statement that is on our website,” he says.

Communications Minister David Cunliffe announced the public service had met the 2007 goal for e-government at Govis.

The final report on the feasibility of an “e-government application development centre” will be published this week.

The centre, a project of ITANZ, is designed to help evolve applications for government agencies and then to commercialise them as appropriate for wider, probably international sale.

Nearly two thirds of government departments are performing better than average in terms of online accessibility, while only about 15 per cent are in need of improvement, says Laurence Millar, director of the e-government unit of the State Services Commission.

The tally is an increase of 26 on the number of projects unearthed during an initial count last year.

The SSC's e-government unit surveyed 36 public sector agencies to help pool information about plans to put services online.

The future of e-government could involve state agencies sharing computers and networks more extensively.

The e-government unit has done a preliminary examination of how efficiently government agencies’ use ICT, with a view to establishing a case for or against shared services.

The e-government unit is looking for technology and relationships with suppliers for its all-of-government authentication solution, even though Cabinet has not yet approved its implementation.