IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

If Secure Channel can't live up to its name, the system needs serious help

So much for Canada’s reputation as an e-government leader.

An internal document that was published on Monday says Canada Revenue Agency has ordered a review of Secure Channel, the system used at the federal level to transact a variety of public services. According to the document, Secure Channel is riddled with bugs and has experienced a series of crashes, poorly timed upgrades and administration problems. It also revealed that the cost of Secure Channel is going way up – from $600,000 at the moment to an expected $1 billion by the end of the decade. Even the Canada Revenue Agency Review is to cost $100,000. For a country that has regular sat atop a worldwide Accenture survey of online public sector achievements, this is a portrait of everything e-government is not supposed to be – unreliable, inefficient and expensive.

Although it was referred to in other news media as an online taxation system, Secure Channel has a much bigger footprint in the government than Canada Revenue Agency. Other departments connected to the Secure Channel network (SCNet) include HRSDC/SDC’s Web Record of Employment (ROE) application, the Receiver General’s Buy Button, which allows Canadians and businesses to pay for goods and services, and the CRTC. As pain points go, however, Canada Revenue Agency is a good place to raise awareness about any deeper problems Secure Channel may have. Taxation is a citizen-centric service, one that is likely to attract the attention of parliamentarians and perhaps even the Prime Minister’s Office.

The problems with Secure Channel would not be so surprising if it weren’t consistently held up as a major example of Government On-Line (GOL) success. Over the last five years, it has been raised at various industry events as an enabler for a closer relationship between the government and the governed in areas such as health care. If the investigation reveals it was poorly designed for the start, it will reflect badly on Public Works, which is already under fire for poorly developed procurement reform plans. There were some 20 vendors involved in creating Secure Channel, but the heat would be most likely to fall on Bell Canada, which created “Team BCE” (whose members include CGI) to keep the system on the cutting edge. Fairly high-profile technologies, such as security software from Entrust, formed the foundation of Secure Channel, so if it’s not working well, where does the government go from here?

According to Canadian Press, which obtained the Canada Revenue Agency document under an Access to Information Request, Secure Channel reached a nadir when all users of the “My Account” service were required to apply for a temporary password to be sent through surface mail to their homes. That’s right: written passwords delivered via Canada Post. There isn’t an enterprise in the country that would be stupid enough to take that kind of security risk, so no wonder the agency saw its number of online clients dramatically fall. In all likelihood, the review of Secure Channel will reveal bad processes, not bad technology, as the source of the system’s ills. (It may also expose some issues the government faces around scaling to meet demands, if the recent online Census experiment was any indication.)

The news of Secure Channel’s problems and the review is coming out at the worst time, given that GTEC, the annual public sector IT event, is scheduled to take place in Ottawa next week. It will probably be much discussed in the hallways between sessions, but hopefully someone will be brave enough to address this issue head-on. If Canada really cares about maintaining its e-government leadership, outlining how it will turn Secure Channel around is the best way to do it.

Autor(en)/Author(s): Shane Schick

Quelle/Source: ITBusiness, 16.10.2006