THE Department of Finance (DOF) is eyeing 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 Chinese firm Huawei’s Philippine office.
Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said select online courses and classes can be accessed through a private cloud service dedicated to the PTA, wherein 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 meeting with Huawei Philippines’s officials, led by its CEO Ray Zhang, in August. Zhang 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 said.
Director Angelica Sarmiento, head of the DOF’s Central Management Information Office, explained it was possible to come up with this online setup for training local treasurers, through “thin clients” or 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 S. 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.
Shawn Long, Huawei Philippines director for Government, said the company is ready to offer its information and communications technology solutions, and organize workshops to assist the DOF and its attached agencies in migrating to an online environment.
The company plans to introduce to the Philippines soon its cloud service, Long said.
During the PTA’s launch in February, Dominguez said the institution is the first of its kind in the country. The PTA will not only provide the country’s revenue collectors and administrators with continuing training on best practices to sharpen their competitiveness but will also aim to heighten their commitment to their profession and raise their ethical standards.
Dominguez said he expects the PTA to collect information from all over the world and build strong linkages between research and education, while ensuring “complementarity between professional training and professional management.”