Online education for Tax Academy

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III is exploring a plan to provide training and continuing education programs for local government treasurers through online courses offered by the Philippine Tax Academy (PTA), possibly in partnership with information and communications technology (ICT) provider Huawei Philippines.

Dominguez said selected online courses and classes can be accessed through a private cloud service dedicated to the PTA. In this way, enrollees can remotely access the PTA’s online course offerings through their own computers, tablets or smartphones.

The Finance chief broached this possibility during a recent meeting with Huawei Philippines’ top executives led by its CEO Ray Zhang, who said the company is also developing its online education program and is now in the process of migrating its training systems over the Internet.

“We have the PTA. We can study if the training can be online. Each municipality has a local treasurer, we can do the training online,” Dominguez told Zhang during their meeting.

Director Angelica Sarmiento, the head of the DOF’s Central Management Information Office, said it was possible to come up with this online setup for training local treasurers, through “thin clients” (lightweight, hard drive-less computers) used to establish remote connections to the main PTA server.

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) has partnered with Huawei Philippines to encourage young innovators to come up with ICT solutions in empowering communities.

According to Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran, the PTA has already submitted to the DICT its three-year Strategic Information Plan, which includes setting up an information system for the Academy to facilitate knowledge sharing. /