BIR seeks DICT help after ‘hardware meltdown’
THE Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) is seeking the help of the Department of Information and Communications Technology ( DICT) in addressing a “major hardware meltdown” in one of its data centers.
In a report to Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez 3rd, BIR Commissioner Caesar Dulay said the bureau’s electronic Tax Information System (eTIS) and Large Taxpayers Service (LTS) had been down since July 3.
“We already wrote DICT ... but even before we wrote DICT, [the] ISG has been following up with them the early resolution of the eTIS issue,” he said in the report disclosed to reporters Thursday night.
ISG is the Information Systems Group of the BIR.
In the letter obtained by reporters dated July 18, 2018, Dulay told DICT acting Secretary Eliseo Rio about the July 3 breakdown of the data center, which houses and hosts the bureau’s core systems and certain eService.
The BIR chief explained that the server breakdown “rendered eTIS unavailable and inaccessible to BIR” since July 3 and is now “causing an enormous disruption of eTIS operations, affecting taxpayers of LTS and Revenue Region (RR) 8-Makati.”
“We are now expressing a very serious concern,” he said, stressing that the prolonged inaccessibility of eTIS will ultimately have dire consequences on revenues collected by LTS and RR Makati.
Dulay also reported to Dominguez that the BIR had been using manual ITS since July 3.
With this, Dulay requested a more expedient and urgent response from DICT Data Center Support in addressing the bureau’s concerns.
The DICT was also asked to provide a timeline of activities on hardware restoration so that the BIR would know when availability or accessibility of eTIS would be restored.
Rio assured that the agency is already working to resolve the hardware failure in the eTIS and that it would turn over to the BIR new hardware environment for them to reinstall eTIS by Monday next week.”
He explained that the BIR’s servers were one of those government agencies’ servers affected when hit by a hardware malfunction.
While the bureau was able to back up its data, the agency has no disaster recovery for it, “thus the app is still not accessible for BIR use,” he said in a text message to TheManilaTimes.