To improve online reporting of and search for soil and groundwater pollution remediation fees, this project expands automatic interest calculation at the front-end of the online report system. Once a function is complete, the business unit is notified with instructions regarding the test, ensuring that the algorithms for interest calculation are consistent with the current calculations performed by humans. Currently, review units process around 500 overdue payments every quarter. These cases require review units to manually calculate the interest and then notify late payers to pay the owed interest in the next quarter. Therefore, the addition of the automatic real-time interest calculating function has shortened the time spent on human calculations and notification. That means a savings of at least 15 work days for the review units. The improved system strengthens the management of supplementary payments, builds the electronic management functions for supplementary payments, integrates the collection of unreported substances that should have been reported, and provides an automatic e-mail reminder service. These functions have shortened the processing time for supplementary payments. Payers can save more than 90% of time spent on filling out successive reports, while review units save at least 85 hours of review time every quarter. This will increase efficiency in following up on supplementary payments. The system integrates electronic fee collection into its procedures. This increases speed in settling amounts for remediation fees submitted, while also increasing the accuracy of accounting statements. The procedure provides banks with diverse ways to collect fees, and expedites administrative operations for payers to submit their remediation fees. Printing of the bill is added in step two of the reporting procedure, so that payers can remit bills in convenience stores or banks after downloading and printing them out. To complete payment, payers only need to wait for the system queue to finish its automated verification procedure. It will then automatically reconcile the accounts and send an e-mail to notify payers that they have completed payment for the quarter. To promote the use of online reporting, the EPA organized 3 training sessions for hands-on operation. 94 people participated in the sessions and, according to survey results, 99% of the participants were satisfied with the instructor for giving clear and easy-to-follow instructions; 90% were satisfied with the time and venue of the sessions; and more than 80% were satisfied with the functions and operation related to the system.

Soil and groundwater, Remediation Fees, Internet Application