The Department of Finance is (DOF) exploring a plan to provide training and continuing education programs for local government treasurers through online courses offered by the Philippine Tax Academy (PTA), leveraging on a private cloud service.
According to a recent report, the selected online courses and classes can be accessed through a private cloud service that is dedicated to the Academy.
This will allow course and class participants to remotely access the Academy’s online course offerings through the comforts of their own computers, tablets, or smartphones.
This idea was brought up during a meeting with a possible partner for this initiative, an information and communications technology (ICT) provider, which is also developing its own online education program and is in the process of migrating its training systems over the internet.
The Department believes that it was possible to come up with this online setup for training local treasurers through the use of ‘thin clients”.
‘Thin clients” are lightweight, hard drive-less computers that are used to establish remote connections to the main PTA server, which can be used by the local treasurers of each municipality.
The Academy has already submitted to the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) its 3-year Strategic Information Plan.
This plan includes setting up an information system for the Academy to facilitate knowledge sharing.
A first of its kind in the Philippines, the Academy offers a plethora of services. It will provide the country’s revenue collectors and administrators with continuing training on best practices to sharpen their competitiveness.
Moreover, it will also aim to increase their commitment to their profession and raise their ethical standards.
The Academy is expected to collect information from all over the world and build strong linkages between research and education.
This should be done while guaranteeing “complementarity between professional training and professional management.”
Furthermore, the Academy should also be a tool for developing continuing cooperation with other professional associations, development and funding institutions as well as foreign governments.
The ICT provider is ready to offer its ICT solutions and organise workshops in order to assist the Department and its attached agencies in migrating to an online environment.
The company is also planning to introduce its cloud service to the Philippines.
This move would further boost investor confidence in the economy as it helps reduce costs for businesses in terms of investing in computer hardware and software.
