THE City Treasurer's Office (CTO) recently announced that business owners in Davao City can now pay their taxes online through Land Bank of the Philippines.
“Our taxpayers who would want to pay their business taxes and other fees in relation to their business permits, mayor's permits, licenses renewal, among others, they could do it online just like paying bills through your mobile phones,” CTO head Erwin Alparaque said in an earlier interview.
Government offices utilizing various forms of digital technology to improve their services is nothing new. In the past couple of years we have seen more and more government agencies slowly going digital.
We can see that somehow these efforts have improved the convenience in availing of government services.
However, it is still not perfect or as good as we hope it to be.
While we appreciate how the government is working on using technology better to deliver services, the efforts in doing this is still kind of slow. There may still be some technologies or methods out there that could speed up government processes.
Some steps may have been replaced with online processes but we cannot fully assure that these have been efficient. Long lines still plague the government offices particularly during renewal season.
The use of technology is commendable but we hope that government offices will employ technology that will reduce the need for people to queue up for hours. Hopefully, people will soon only line up at government offices to pick up the documents and permits that they have requested.