Posts tagged “brunei darussalam”

Published

Every year the Brunei Darussalam Department of Labour releases a census that all local businesses must fill in. It’s a legal requirement and every year they don’t mind reminding you of the fines for neglecting to do so.

Well this year they’re trying something new: they’re doing it online via their newly released Labour Control System. I applaud the Department of Labour for taking real action in converting actual processes into an online workflow.

Like with any new system, there are bound to be bugs. And I found a rather embarrassing oversight. When asked for my country of origin, I could not select Brunei.

Under Country of Origin, Brunei was conspicuously missing

Erm, yeah. And I had to fill in a value or it wouldn’t allow me to proceed.

This wasn’t the only issue I cam across. Initially the system could not even retrieve my Company Registration Number and simply returned the value null.

Teething problems. It happens to the best of us. I hope the Department of Labour isn’t discouraged because bugs or not this is a step in the right direction!

Edit (19th October 2015): We now have a more complete list of countries which includes Brunei!

Published

I was surprised to receive an email attachment from Brunei’s Tabung Amanah Pekerja (TAP; Employees Trust Fund) that was formatted as an OpenDocument Spreadsheet. I am not familiar with their in-house standards of practice but I acknowledge them for using the OpenDocument Formats. However, I question the utility of actually sending these formats to people outside their organization considering that most would likely have no idea how to open such a file.

I think it would better serve by exporting the document to PDF or a Microsoft Office format. OpenOffice and LibreOffice have all this built-in. It would certainly help avoid confusion on the recipient’s part.

ODF Logo courtesy of ODF Community