By MICHAEL FOREMAN
The Inland Revenue Department is negotiating a large-scale purchase of network management software from United States manufacturer Novell that will enable it to keep electronic tabs on every taxpaying citizen.
Neither party was willing to discuss details of the deal yesterday but the department is understood to be close
to signing to implement Novell's eDirectory and DirXML directory software throughout its organisation.
Internally, Novell's eDirectory would enable Revenue staff to have one login procedure for seamless access to e-mail, applications and departmental files.
Externally, the software would allow the department to verify the identity of taxpayers online and could be used as a security mechanism for the filing of company payroll records and eventually individual tax returns over the internet.
Last August the Inland Revenue abandoned its controversial irFile online payroll records system, which depended on digital certificates to provide security, less than two years after it was implemented.
DirXML would be used in conjunction with eDirectory to cause any changes to taxpayer details to automatically flow through to all other systems.
This feature may prove to be a source of concern to civil liberties groups if other Government departments standardise on eDirectory as part of future e-government initiatives, as information on a citizen held by one department could very easily be made accessible to the systems of any other state agency.
This year Novell signed an agreement with the Irish Department of Finance, covering all central and local government departments and state-owned companies.
Novell usually charges around $US2 a user for a licence that includes eDirectory and DirXML, but country manager Peter Revell said the scale of the project had challenged normal price models.
"We could charge 5c a month instead of a one-time $5, for example. We are still working on the charges. In this case the entire population would be on the directory - that's 3.8 million people."
