Electronic Submission of Information

Under the Electronic Transactions Ordinance (Cap. 553), electronic records submitted by the public to this Department are acceptable provided they conform to the prescribed format, manner and procedure stipulated below :-

Electronic records in English shall be encoded in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) or ISO 10646-1:2000.

Electronic records in Chinese shall be encoded in Big-5 or ISO 10646-1:2000 standard,

a.	where electronic records are coded in the Big-5 standard, the set of characters is restricted to that coded in the Big-5 standard or included in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) published by the Government in 2001;

b.	where electronic records are coded in the ISO 10646-1:2000 standard, the set of characters is restricted to Chinese characters within the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) Unified Ideographs characters coded in the ISO 10646-1:2000 standard or characters in the HKSCS published by the Government in 2001.

HKSAR Government. HKSCS is available for downloading at the Digital 21 web site of the HKSAR Government at http://www.gov.hk/digital21.

Where electronic records are compressed, the following compression standards shall be
followed : -

a.	Zip file (.zip); or

b.	GNU zip file (.gz)

Electronic records shall be sent as follows:—

a.	through electronic mail conforming to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and either Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) or the Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME) standard and with size not exceeding 10 MB;

b.	in the form of 1.44MB diskette with size of 3.5 inches in MS-DOS format for files not exceeding one diskette's storage capacity;

c.	in the form of CD-ROM in ISO 9660 format; or

d.	in the form of DVD-ROM in ISO 13346 format.

For the avoidance of doubt, electronic records in the following physical form WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED -

a.	Floppy diskettes of size 5.25 inches or 8 inches;

b.	Iomega Zip Disk;

c.	Iomega Jaz Disk;

d.	Programmable Diskette (PD);

e.	Magneto-Optical Diskette (MO);

f.	4mm DLT Tape;

g.	8mm Data Tape;

h.	Data Cartridges and Tape Cartridges;

i.	RAM cards in any form; or

j.	any other physical storage media.

When submission is made in acceptable physical forms, a label shall be affixed to the diskette / CD-ROM / DVD-ROM with identification information such as name of sender, contact telephone no. / address and file reference written thereon. To facilitate our subsequent follow up, please also indicate which public key of IRD has been used for data encryption, if encryption is made. Besides, please do not use the same diskette / CD-ROM / DVD-ROM to store records relating to different file reference

Textual information can be submitted in the form of an electronic record. However, there exists many word processing software, shareware and freeware in the market for different operating systems. While textual documents can be prepared using different types of word processing software, the document shall be saved for submission in one of the following formats -

	Plain text (TXT) Most of the word processing software in the market allow users to save their document as plain text. However, please note that when a document is saved as plain text, special effects such as font size, boldface, italics, underline, etc. will be lost.

	Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF); It is supported by the majority of word processing software in the market and can be used to submit files with formatting retained. For the avoidance of doubt, documents in Microsoft Word format (with extension .doc) are not acceptable.

	Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML) Format; or Many word processing software in the market allow users to save their documents in HTML format. For the avoidance of doubt, documents with embedded Visual basic code, flash, Java scripts, or other embedded programming codes are not acceptable.

	Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) ( compatible to Acrobat version 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8).

Graphics in electronic records shall follow the following graphic file formats -

	Encapsulated PostScript Files (EPSF)

	Tag Image File Format (TIFF)

	Portable Network Graphics (PNG)

	Graphic Interchange File Format (GIF)

	Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG)

For submission of Government forms to Government, the Electronic Government Forms (in the form of a software) should be used to generate electronic records and, if required, to make digital signatures. The format of individual supporting document, if any, attached in an electronic record should comply with all the relevant requirements as specified in this document.

An electronic record submitted under a statutory provision must be digitally signed if -

a.	the provision expressly requires the signature of a person; or

b.	the provision requires the submission to be made in a specified form and the specified form has a signature requirement.

Only a digital signature supported by a recognized certificate issued by a certification authority recognized by the Government Chief Information Officer under the Electronic Transactions Ordinance is acceptable. A digital signature shall be attached to an electronic record in accordance with the Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME) standard or the Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS#7). Most upgraded versions of existing browsers in the market can support the use of public key cryptography.

For an electronic record which comprises multiple electronic files and which has to be signed, each individual file shall be separately signed digitally.

Please note that e-mails are vulnerable to third-party interception. You should consider to send your written enquiry by mail or fax if the content is private and confidential. Alternatively, if you have a recognized digital certificate, you may consider to encrypt your e-mail with the corresponding public key of our e-mail address. Please note that reply to your e-mail enquiry will not be made via e-mail unless you requested and have your recognized public key available for encryption.

The public keys of the e-Certs of IRD can be downloaded from the Hongkong Post e-Cert Directory. For detail procedures of how to download the e-Cert of other people ( public keys ) , please see the "e-Cert User Guide" which is available in the Hongkong Post e-Cert web page. Please note that each Hongkong Post e-Cert is only valid for a limited period and users have to obtain the latest e-Cert public key from Hongkong Post e-Cert Directory if the previous one obtained has been expired.