Following the Tax Office's refusal to provide the ECI (Electronic Commerce Interface) for processing the BAS return after prior written undertakings, Muli were forced to develop a public campaign in conjunction with the Linux community to influence the Tax Office to complete their undertaking.

The Tax Office gave both verbal and written confirmation of their commitment to provide a Unix version without any limitations or provisos.

If you look at Question 10(b) of our letter (1) dated 26 April 2000, "We confirm the Tax Office's verbal undertaking to provide a Unix version and we further clarify this is being suitable for Linux also" .

In the Tax Office response (5) 29 May 2000, the Tax Office clearly states "the ATO will also be developing Apple and Unix compatible versions of the ATO ECI software application".

Again, when the Tax Office finally issued their ECI software, the dust cover clearly states (6a) "Development of the Apple Macintosh and Unix versions of the ECI are near completion but not available at this stage". Although the dust jacket is dated June, we did not receive the software until the 3 August 2000.

For the ATO to now say they had no commitment is an outright lie.

We, as a company spent over $100,000 on developing the BAS compliant software. Our correspondence clearly shows we went into extensive detail to ensure our product complied with the Tax Act so we could complete the total process, including ECI. Because of the Tax Office's clear statements that they would provide the Unix version of the ECI, Muli undertook with its clients not to charge for the BAS ECI work until it was completed. The Tax Office now puts us in a financially embarrassing position as we are unable to complete and therefore unable to invoice. Perhaps the Tax Office would like to refund us our $150,000 of expenses.

I do not think so!!!

To enable focus, the Linux community developed the following guidelines of what is expected for electronic interfaces for all levels of Government, as a way of determining what is a realistic expectation from the Australian Tax Office.

1. OPEN ELECTRONIC GOVERNMENT GUIDELINES

1. To ensure all Government data and/or software provided via electronic format is able to be used from all common operating systems and their utilities, ie:


a.   Microsoft Windows/NT

b.   Unix/Linux

c.   Macintosh

d.   Other ?

2. That software solutions will utilise true open standards without proprietary extensions.


Output on all platforms of similar format:

• Plain ASCI
• HTML
• Adobe.pdf   (not Microsoft Word)
3. Where special readers, viewers, interactive solutions are required, they will be made available to end users at no cost premium, ie. between operating systems and not require the purchase of more than the simple utility  (not the whole application Internet Explorer).
4. Should be freely downloadable for all common platforms.
5. The provided solutions shall not enable security breaches.
6. The total data transferred via the utility shall be made known to the end user.