ETRACS

Enhanced Tax Revenue and Collection System (ETRACS) is a web-based, GIS ready, LGU taxation application design for Provincial, City and Municipal LGUs. It has the following core modules: 

 

1.  Real Property Tax Module – fully automated assessment of land, buildings, machineries, plants and trees and fully integrated with the collection system
2.  Business Permit and Licensing Module – automated assessment of new/renewed business permit applications and fully integrated with the collection system
3. Tax Collection Module – controls accountable forms issued to collectors, has daily remittance and liquidation functions, supports online and offline collections, automated posting of transactions and updating of ledgers.
4. Administration Module – covers administrators access protocols
5. Taxpayer Registration Module – covers creation of individual, juridical and multiple taxpayers accounts and reconciliation of accounts

ETRACS Features

• Software is free for LGUs
• Source code will be provided to LGUs to allow customization and minor  modification
• Update version of the software will be provided for free as part of ETRACS user communities
• Can be interfaced with GIS
• Training for users, administrators and IT programmers will be provided
• Enables easy access to reports by decision-makers
• LGU investment will focus on IT acquisition, training and capability building and cost for technical support for 1 year
   

Core LGU Offices involved in ETRACS implementation

Adopting the system will automate the following offices:

1. The Municipal Assessor’s Office– all the Real Property Units (Land, Building, Machineries) will be encoded into the system.  This will be followed by  the process of data cleansing and approval by the Assessor before this can be used for transactions such the  issuance of a computerized Tax Declaration.  If the Assessor’s Office has enough personnel, it is ideal to undertake actual property tax mapping to update the Assessor’s information although  this activity is not a prerequisite to computerization.  Actual Property Tax Mapping can be done on a periodic basis to check field information as basis to updating  the different information of the property units.

 

2. The Business Permit and Licensing Office-  all business data will be encoded into the system to automate the process of assessment.  Once the system is installed and the business rules are configured based on the LGU business tax code, the Business Permit Module can easily assess the new and for renewal business applications.

 

3. The Municipal Treasury Office-  all tax ledger data will be encoded into the system and this will undergo data cleansing to weed out duplications or even triplicates.  Once the data are cleansed, these can  now be posted and ready for transaction.  With the automation of the Treasury Office, Land and Business Tax collection can be streamlined to do away with redundancy of collectors.  Some of them can be given other tasks4/ to bolster the local tax revenue campaign of the LGU.

 

4. ICT Unit/ Office – this unit/office will serve as the nerve center of the automation project.  This is where the server is located placed and is connected to the Offices of the Assessor, Business, Treasury thru LAN/WAN (Wide Area Network). The unit should be manned by a core of 2 to 3 legitimate IT personnel and serve as System Administrator. Other Offices such as Planning, Accounting and other units of the LGU can also be connected particularly when they have their respective applications systems utilized.

 

In cases where the LGU does not have an ICT Unit or Office, the LGU may opt to initially engage IT persons through job contract with the future plan of creating positions for the IT.  This is  based on the experiences of other LGUs that have moved  into computerization.