Inland Revenue online services not available to every citizen

As a registered user of the online services offered by the Department of Inland Revenue, I received an e-mail informing me that as from mid-July access to online services would only be available using an e-ID. As I did not yet have an e-ID, I promptly visited the e-ID office in Valletta where I went through the registration process. After receiving my PIN number a few days later I could access a number of government services online... so I thought.

For some Maltese government online services one logical requirement is the installation of a digital certificate, which the system constantly refused to grant me.

After a number of tries I gave up and sent a message to the support staff, who contacted me the following day. To my amazement - in this day and age of secure online banking, secure online transactions, a multitude of secure browsers and diverse operating systems - the person on the other end of the line informed me that as the system was "secure", requesting a digital certificate was only possible if one was running Windows XP or Vista and using Internet Explorer. Other (more advanced and secure) browsers and operating systems like Firefox, Safari and Mac OSX couldn't be availed of.

I let this very helpful person know that I already had a number of digital certificates by leading issuers installed, which certificates were installed without any problems whatsoever, and had never come across this sort of shortcoming in any site I visited. The reply I got was an expected one: "That's how the system is. We cannot do anything about it".

I would thus like to ask the authorities the reasons behind these restrictions and why a service that should be available to each and every citizen is actually not so.