How to: Use e-government online services part 1
By Paul Marden
The Government Gateway
Purchasing a Digital Certificate
Before you begin
Registering with the Gateway
Resources
The Internet has revolutionised the way we interact in countless ways, and the UK government hasn’t been immune to this change. You can buy your shopping 24 hours a day, you can book your holiday at 2am, but can you really interact with government when it suits you?
A great deal of government information is currently available online. However, true e-governance comes when we can interact with government, submit forms, receive documentation and even vote, online. Many government departments have begun to realise that the Internet can dramatically cut the cost of interacting with partners. For in the same way that e-commerce can reduce the cost of sales, the Internet can reduce the cost of regular government tasks like collecting taxes and granting benefits.
In the last year several departments have gone online with applications that could save your company time and money. Current online applications cover the following:
Inland Revenue - Income Tax Self Assessment, PAYE, Corporation Tax
DTI - Export License Applications
HM Customs & Excise - VAT
DEFRA - IACS Area Aid Applications.
The Government Gateway
Each of these applications is provided through a central secure infrastructure called the Government Gateway. Launched in January 2001 the Gateway provides the glue that binds each web application to the back-end database systems belonging to each government department.Obviously when sending in your VAT or PAYE returns, you want to know that the systems in place are secure, free from prying eyes, that what you send is what the government receives and you don’t want anyone else impersonating you.
The Gateway implements security using a multi-tiered approach, categorising applications then protecting them using industry standard defences. Access to level 1 services, such as PAYE and Self Assessment, is restricted by user IDs and passwords, and are protected by Secure Sockets Layer SSL. SSL encrypts data and verifies that it is not altered between your computer and the Gateway. In fact, it is used by most e-commerce sites to protect your credit card details, and is indicated in your browser’s status bar by the padlock icon.
Figure 1: The padlock icon in your browsers toolbar indicates that the current page is secured using SSL
The government requires much greater assurance of your identity before allowing access to level 2 and 3 services, such as VAT returns, and favours the use of digital certificates. These are small files issued only when you prove your identity to an independent, trusted certification authority. The certificate is then used to digitally sign each transaction you send to the Gateway.
Signing a transaction verifies your identity, establishes your credentials to perform the intended transaction and protects the integrity of the information itself it cannot be changed once you have signed it.
The government is so confident in this technology that electronically signing a Government Gateway transaction is now legally binding. In other words, once you have digitally signed a transaction you can’t deny that you sent it.
You must register with the Government Gateway if you want to use online government services. The registration process is made up of these stages:
Register with the Government Gateway
Enrol for government services
Activate the service, with User ID and/or Activation PIN received through the post.
Purchasing a Digital Certificate
Before registering you should decide if you need a digital certificate or not a digital certificate is required to file VAT returns but optional for Self Assessment and PAYE. Certificates can be purchased from ChamberSign or Equifax, and cost under 50 per year. Here we look at the cheaper of the two, Equifax, which conducts the process almost completely online.Buying the certificate is simply a process of proving your identity - and the identity of your company - to Equifax, and then downloading your certificate upon approval. My experience was that the process was fairly painless - it took me about 15 minutes to fill in the first forms.
I was asked to provide the details of my business, such as name, address and VAT number if applicable, as well as my credit card details and my name, address and date of birth. To prove my identity Equifax performed a personal credit check; I was then asked a series of questions about my financial history, such as what was the balance on my last credit card statement and what was my credit limit.
Next my web browser was used to generate a pair of unique numbers called public and private keys, which are used to create the digital certificate. Equifax provided very little guidance on this part of the process and unless I accepted the default options it was quite confusing about what was being generated and why.
Figure 2: To buy a digital certificate from Equifax you must first provide details about yourself & your company.
I then had to prove I had authority to act on behalf of my business. Despite Equifax’s literature stating the whole process could be performed online, this part required me to either post or fax a letter signed by a director or partner, in the case of a partnership or company, or a tax/VAT return or letter signed by an accountant or solicitor, for a sole trader.
Six days later I received email confirmation that my credentials were approved and that my digital certificate was ready to download. The email contained a link to a secure Equifax website, where downloading the certificate should have been a matter of entering a unique ID. However, I experienced a number of problems as a result of the Equifax server crashing, which meant that a new unique ID had to be generated and resent. This worked successfully but took an extra 5 days.
Once the certificate was downloaded, I had further problems trying to use it to register with the Gateway. This took considerable time, to first reproduce and then resolve, although throughout the process Equifax customer support agents were extremely helpful.
Before you begin
The Gateway is designed to be computer system and browser independent. The practicalities of achieving this mean that at present only a limited set of popular computers and browsers can use the Gateway. Table 1 summarises which operating systems and browsers in combination with which digital certificates are currently supported by the Gateway.
Registering with the Gateway
To register with the Government Gateway first go to https://secure.gateway.gov.uk, then decide if you are registering as an individual, business or agent on behalf of other businesses. Each option restricts access to appropriate services, e.g. Self Assessment for Individuals, VAT, PAYE and IACS for businesses. Here we will look only at individual and business registration.Obviously to use all web-applications available through the Gateway you will need to register twice, once as an individual and once as a business. However, you should note that one digital certificate cannot be used for both registrations.
The process is similar in either case, and is dependent on whether you are using a certificate or not. In order to register without a certificate you must provide the Gateway with your name, email address and a password. You then enrol for at least one service, by providing identifying information, such as your Unique Tax Reference number and NI number in the case of Self-Assessment. If correct then you will be sent a unique User ID and an Activation PIN by post. When you receive these letters you can return to the Gateway, log in and activate the service.
Figure 3: In order to register with a digital certificate you must acknowledge that you trust the Government Gateway as a secure
place to download programs.
When registering with a Digital Certificate you will be asked where you bought it. A small program that can sign your transactions will then be installed on your PC. However, you must acknowledge that you trust the Gateway before it can be downloaded. Once installed you’ll be able to log in using your certificate, and then enrol for a service. As before, you’ll have wait until an activation PIN is sent through the post prior to using the service.
You’re now ready to use the services you have enrolled for. In the second article in this series, we will look at how to use some of the services available.
Resources
For more information about the Government Gateway or its services visit http://www.gateway.gov.uk, or for more technical information about the Gateway and how it works visit http://www.govtalk.gov.uk.Other sources include:
http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/egov/online_now.htm
http://www.hmce.gov.uk/bus/ddes/howtoddes.htm
http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/efiling/help/empreg.htm
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/gateway_partnerlink/
http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/ebu/
About the Author
Paul Marden is a self employed software engineer specialising in distributed applications using Microsoft technologies and data warehousing using Oracle.Screen shots of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 reproduced by permission from Microsoft Corporation.
