Sam Varghese
Thursday, 15 May 2008 21:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Greig, however, is nothing if not persistent. A year later, he again raised the topic with the tax office. This time he was told by a certain individual, who was in a position to know, that the tax office had developed another version of the LInux ECI client that very month (November 2006), and that it was a beta version which, though it passed what were referred to as certain beta tests, was still in beta.
He was also told that of November 2003, the tax office had a little over 100 businesses registered as being interested in using an ECI client for Linux and that the number had not increased until November 2006.
And he was assured that since the tax office remained "committed to providing online services to the business community", the proposal for a Linux ECI client would be resubmitted. A decision would be taken by February 2007, Greig was informed.
(Why a proposal for a Linux client needed to be resubmitted, when there was already something which was working, is baffling).
Greig wrote back to this individual, requesting him to put the existing client up for download and measure the level of interest by the number of downloads. " For a start, no-one in the general Linux community is aware of a November 2006 Beta version of the ECI for Linux. I have a functioning copy of the April 2005 version, which was excellent, and by no means
could it have been considered a Beta version," he wrote.
(Greig's reference to an April 2005 client may seem puzzling but it is not - the client had been downloadable from April 26 onwards. Nobody knew about it - apart, one presumes, from those who were in the know. Greig found out about it in the first week of November 2005).
That was the end of any correspondence - Greig did not hear back from the tax office after that.
A few days back, he thought of raising the issue again - he is reminded about it whenever the end of the financial year rolls around (in Australia, the financial year ends on June 30) and thought it would be a good idea to collate all the information and try to see if any politician with the power to intervene was interested.
