The Department of Lands and Physical Planning hopes to collect between 80-100 million kina every year with the launch of its new online payment system today.
This new system will now replace the old method of payment and as much as possible, remove the human face to doing business when everything goes online.
NiuPay in partnership with Kina Bank delivered the department’s online payment system today and can be accessed using smart devices.
The benefits of this online payment system are huge. Apart from Revenue Collection, 3 to 4 years down the lane, it will move into electronic titling, enabling users to register their land and obtain titles online and for safe record keeping.
Lands Minister John Rosso says the Lands Department has not spent a toea to get this system up and running and will not spend any money to keep it going.
“How it is paid is a matter of confidentiality between partners themselves, but for Lands itself and government and tax payers, we do not pay one toea. So when you do transactions online using your card, it is between the bank and Niu Pay people. They sort out whatever payments, which is a commercial transaction between themselves on how they get paid. But the biggest thing is that, as the department and the government, we do not pay one toea,” said Mr Rosso.
NiuPay, the developers of this system have also developed the Online Visa Payment System that is currently being used by the Immigrations.
NiuPay says they are not here to compete with local software developers.
He says the deployment of this program comes at the right time when the country is implementing the new normal and this payment method will help users pay from the comfort of their homes instead of queuing up at offices.
Prime Minister James Marape, valuing the significance of this development in the Lands Department took time to launch this new payment system.
He commended the minister and the department for taking a huge step in reforming this department which at most times has been labelled as being “corrupt”.
He said the department is still owed some K400 million and they hope the new system can help recoup some of these monies.
