Topic 219

Government administration: record keeping, tax collection, policy implementation by Akira

The government can use computers and Internet for record keeping, tax collection, and for policy implementation. It can be a convenient way to do these things but they can have flaws.

The first issue associated with this topic is security. This is because other people who aren’t working for the government can access the records if they hack into the database. Also the truth can be faked. For example people can fake the payment of tax or people can change the amount of tax to pay. Another thing that can happen is that the government can charge people the wrong amount of tax. Also because of the possible breach of record it can also be an issue of privacy. This is mainly because the individual’s information kept by the government might be leaked or be misused.

One solution that can overcome this is to keep government record secluded so no one except for authorized personnel can access the data. Also they can check the tax payment manually as well as on the computer and to avoid the leak of privacy they can put protections on the information. Another way they can keep record safer is to make the law about invasion of privacy harsher.

Ethical issues concerning this topic for example is someone faking the tax on purpose. This would be unethical because you wouldn’t be paying the amount of money you owe the community when you fake tax. Also leaking the record kept by the government is extremely unethical too. This is mainly because the government keeps these records to keep track of people and leaking them means that you are betraying the government as well as the individuals.

The people who are responsible for this problem are the people who are faking tax or stealing information kept by the government. This is mainly because they are causing the problems and because it is illegal.

One alternative decision is to keep the process all manual so it would be harder to take private information from the government because the information would be kept more secure. Another alternative decision is to keep the information all secluded so only a few people who need it can be able to access the data.

One consequence of making all the process manually is making everything more time consuming and less convenient. This would not be good because the people would not be able to access the information easily as before. Secluding the information would make everything take more time and harder to perform. This is because they would not be able to access their private data for various things so as a result any process that requires private data would take longer as a result.