A “Tiger Team” comprising Fiji Revenue and Customs Service (FRCS) and members of the business community is looking at how the problematic Tax Payer Online Services (TPOS) will be fixed.
“We’ve been trying to implement an online tax administration system since 2018. We finally completed that project on the March 31. So every single tax form is now available online for people to fill out in their office, in their home, without having to come into the tax office. So it’s a really big step. It’s the biggest digitisation project that Fiji has ever done, never mind the tax office,” said FRCS chief executive officer Mark Dixon.
Concerns over TPOS were highlighted by the Fiscal Review Committee in its final report to the Government, where it blamed a lack of stakeholders involvement at the early stages of the system’s adoption for problems faced by taxpayers when they use it.
“We acknowledge that it is not perfect and there are some enhancements we need to make to TPOS to make the ease of doing business for our tax payers better,” said Mr Dixon.
“What we are doing to remedy that, is, we’ve created a collaborative team, a co-design team including the Institute of Accountants people, we’ve brought in large and small taxpayers, and they’re sitting around the room with FRSC staff and our IT staff and we are discussing what enhancements need to be made and what priorities we afford to those enhancements.
“And we’ll jointly agree what those enhancements should be, how quickly they need to be fixed, and then we’ll get on and we’ll fix them,” Mr Dixon said.
“So it’s a very big consultative team, it’s already happening, we’re calling it the Tiger Team, where the taxpayer, the Institute of Accountants, ourselves all sit around the table and we agree on what future enhancements we need.
“That’s a meeting every week at the moment. “We’re focused on making sure everybody can file their returns this year and then we’ll create some enhancements to make it a lot easier next year.”
The system runs on the SAP ERP software, which had been criticised by local software experts who believe it is too costly and problematic for a small organisation such as FRCS to use.
