CMC and ICTA facilitate CMC tax payment online

Tuesday, 7 January 2014 00:31 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The Colombo Municipal CMC (CMC) and the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) signed a MoU recently to enable Colombo City tax payers to pay several categories of CMC taxes online. Accordingly CMC tax payments which do not require any supplementary documents/manual interventions could now (from 8 January, 2014) be made online. For this the tax payers are required to provide the CMC account number and the relevant street name and assessment number.

Among the tax categories for which this online payment could be made are the following: (1) Rates payments, (2) Trade tax, (3) Tax on businesses, (4) Market rental, (5) House rental, (6) Shops and boutiques rental and (7) Hawkers’ rental. The modus operandi is simple and includes logging in and entering the payment type on the website http://www.eservice.cmc.lk/cmc-citizen-web/Payments/OnlinePayments. Commenting on the facility ICTA Re-engineering Government Program Director Wasantha Deshapriya said that the online payment facility will greatly benefit the 500,000-strong CMC population comprising 150,000 active CMC tax payers. “All the proposed functions will be available to be accessed as a service of the www.srilanka.lk portal. The supported languages will be Sinhala, Tamil and English,” Deshapriya said. “This is yet another step forward in making the dividends of ICT accrue to the people as expressed in the ‘Mahinda Chinthana Vision for the Future’ policy statement of the Government,” Deshapriya added. As stated in the specific e-Government Policy which has been approved by the Cabinet of Ministers all the electronic services (eServices) and electronic information in Sri Lanka will be delivered via ‘Lanka Gate’. Lanka Gate is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based messaging infrastructure, which is envisioned to be the gateway for electronic information and electronic delivery in Sri Lanka. It is envisioned that the CMC will leverage Lanka Gate infrastructure to offer electronic services and electronic information to the general public, other government organisations as well as private sector organisations. In order to do so, the CMC will make use of the following components of Lanka Gate; • Country Portal - To offer online services • GovSMS - To offer mobile based service delivery • Government Info. Centre (GIC) - Help Desk (8 a.m. -10 p.m.) • Internet payment gateway (IPG) interface :- To facilitate provision for online transactions • LIX (Lanka Interoperability Exchange) :- For data mediation across organisations Objectives The CMC intends to offer the following eService to the stakeholders by leveraging the Lanka Gate infrastructure; ICTA will provide the required technical and advisory services for implementing the identified eServices. Security ICTA shall ensure that all possible security concerns related to data sharing and connecting to internal systems are addressed in a comprehensive manner through assessments carried out by Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team (SL CERT, www.slcert.gov.lk). Extension ICTA will extend Lanka Gate components such as the Country Portal, 1919-GovSMS and the Lanka Interoperability Exchange (LIX) which is the data exchange Enterprise Service Bus to enable the CMC to offer eServices to CMC stakeholders efficiently and in a secure manner leveraging multiple delivery channels. ICTA will extend the Lanka Gate IPG service to enable the CMC to accept payments online for any transactional eServices offered by ITL. According to the Cabinet decision dated 23 December 2009 and consequent FR Circular No 447, ICTA will also facilitate acceptance of electronic payment over-the counter, if requested by the CMC.