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Australian Report On Progress Towards the Paperless Trading GoalsIn APEC・s Blueprint for Action on Electronic Commerce
to catalogues, and their preferred way of conducting business.
• Standardised Remittance Advice
One of the major problems faced by SMEs when doing business with government electronically is tracking and reconciling payments with transactions. This arises because the only advice currently provided to identify payments is an 18 digit code. This project will draw on existing international standard document definitions (eg, UN/EDIFACT, ANSI X12) to determine the standard content of a remittance advice to accompany an electronic payment. Particular characteristics that the standard content will require are the:
• ability to be linked unambiguously to specific payments on a bank statement to allow reconciliation of multiple and partial payments within a single transaction.
• ability to be presented in multiple formats, including but not limited to, facsimile, e-mail, and HTML, without loss of content, authority or efficacy.
• ability to be implemented at little or no cost in existing agency FMIS installations, preferably through standard government templates, where applicable.
4.Obstacles and Challenges
Please identify any major obstacles in your economy inhibiting progress on paperless trading in government and private sectors, including.
Legal environment
Requirements by businesses to provide paper documents.
The fact that even if businesses take up e-commerce they will still have to use paper documents for some transactions with some trading partners, detracts considerably from the benefits of investing in e-commerce. There are also some concerns over the security and authentication of electronic documents. The Bill of Lading is a prime example, even though authentication facilities (eg. electronic signatures and Bolero (www.bolero.net )) are now readily available. The expansion of the use of seaway bills could facilitate the take up of e-commerce.
Another example is the ．invoice・. Many principals will not accept electronic invoices and therefore prevent the ：total； business process from becoming electronic. This could be attributed to the business culture of trading nations and their belief that unless the original information in hardcopy is provided, the information could be suspect.
Administrative environment
Bandwidth
The National Bandwidth Inquiry was set up in December 1998 to examine issues associated with bandwidth availability and pricing within Australia and to and from Australia. The final report is expected shortly and will be available on the Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts website (www.dcita.gov.au ).
The primary timeframe for the report is the five-year period to 2004, although many of the issues go beyond this period.
The main findings of the Inquiry to date are:
• While technology changes will ensure Australia will have capacity in excess of requirements in most markets, the ownership of the capacity is very concentrated.
• The wholesale price of bandwidth is estimated to fall by up to 50 per cent per annum for the next 5 years on the intra-capital and inter-capital and other ：thick-route； markets.
• The move from uniform, averaged, distance dependent pricing structures will continue into the future; as a consequence areas with limited or no competition are likely to receive less of the benefits of lower prices.
• There is a [next page]