Submission of Electronic Information

Introduction

The Electronic Transactions Ordinance (ETO) was enacted on 7 January 2000 to facilitate the use of electronic transactions for commercial and other purposes. It gives electronic records and digital signatures used in electronic transactions the same legal status as that of their paper-based counterparts.

2. The provisions for legal recognition of electronic records and digital signatures in relation to rules of law and admissibility of electronic records as evidence in court will come into operation on 7 April 2000. Further details on the ETO are available at the web site of the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) www.ogcio.gov.hk.

Submissions under the Buildings Ordinance

3. The Buildings Department (BD) has set up an e-Counter to receive some simple submissions under the Buildings Ordinance (BO). Examples of these submissions are: -

• Application for registration as authorized person/registered structural engineer / registered geotechnical engineer (Forms BA1, BA1A & BA1B)

• Notice of technically competent person(s) appointed to supervise demolition works (Form BA20)

• Application for authorization to carry out / maintain groundwater drainage works (Form BA22)

• Notification to the Building Authority of change of business address of authorized person/registered structural engineer/registered geotechnical engineer/registered general building contractor/registered specialist contractor (Form BA24)

Exemptions

4. Due to the lack of an appropriate infrastructure in BD to receive all electronic submissions, submissions that are time critical , involving multiple signatures or involving voluminous documents with complex layouts, elaborated text format and professional drawings are exempted from the operation of the ETO for the time being.

5. Apart from those exempted provisions, electronic submissions under other provisions of the BO can be sent to BD through electronic mail to the email address receipt@bd.gov.hk or handed to BD on physical media during office hours. The identity of the person making an electronic submission has to be authenticated by a digital certificate issued by the Postmaster General or other certification authorities recognised by the Government Chief Information Officer under the ETO. Details on such e-certificate and its application procedures are available at the web site of Hongkong Post www.hongkongpost.gov.hk.

6. The Permanent Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development (Communications and Technology) has gazetted the format, manner and procedure for the acceptance of electronic information by virtue of the ETO [Gazette Notice G.N.1265 effective from 1 March 2008]. Your attention is drawn to the additional requirement under the Buildings Ordinance in relation to the submission of specified forms. Failure to observe the format, manner and procedure will invalidate the submission.

7. To facilitate understanding on the stipulated format, manner and procedure, an explanatory note for layman is provided.  The templates for specified forms (in RTF format) under the BO can be downloaded.

8. BD will keep in view the development of an electronic submission system (ESS) to handle all types of electronic submissions. The exemptions granted under the ETO will be rescinded when the ESS is fully established.

1.1	Buildings Ordinance		Sections 8B(1), 8C(2), 8D(2), 17(1)(Column B), 19(1), and (4), 20(2), 21(2), 25(1) and 42(2)
1.2	Building (Administration) Regulations		Regulations 6(1), 11, 18(1), 18A, 23(1A) and (2), 29(1), 31(1), 33(1), 38 and 47
1.3	Building (Planning) Regulations		Regulations 51(1), 53(1) and 64(1) and (2)
1.4	Building (Private Streets and Access Roads) Regulations		Regulation 28
1.5	Building (Standards of Sanitary Fitments, Plumbing, Drainage Works and Latrines) Regulations		Regulations 62(1) and 73(1)
1.6	Building (Oil Storage Installations) Regulations		Regulations 6(1) and 10(2)

  

2. Provisions Excluded From Application of Section 6 of the Electronic Transactions Ordinance

2.1

Building (Administration) Regulations

Regulations 12(1), (2), (3),and (5), 18(2), 20(1), 25(2), (3) and (4), 26(2) and 28

Format, Manner and Procedure for the Acceptance of Electronic Information by virtue of the Electronic Transactions Ordinance -- Explanatory Note for Layman

This note aims to set out the format, manner and procedure we have stipulated under section 11(2) of the Electronic Transactions Ordinance (Cap. 553) for the submission of electronic information under law.

　
Language

Electronic records which contain English characters only shall be coded in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) or ISO 10646-1:2000. ASCII is the standard for the coding of characters promulgated by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and is the prevalent coding standard in most English operating system environments such as Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, or Unix. For the avoidance of doubt, electronic records coded in Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), which is a character encoding standard commonly used in IBM mainframe machines, will not be accepted;

Electronic records which contain Chinese characters shall be coded as follows:

(a) Chinese characters shall be coded in Big-5 and English characters shall be coded in ASCII, and the set of Chinese characters is restricted to the characters defined in Big-5 or the characters included in the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) published by the Government in 2001. [Big-5 is the commonly used Chinese character encoding standard in Hong Kong. For the avoidance of doubt, GB (Guo Biao) standard (國標碼), which is the prevalent Chinese character encoding standard used for simplified Chinese characters, will not be accepted; HKSCS is available for downloading at the Digital 21 web site of the HKSAR Government] ; or

(b) Chinese and English characters shall be coded in ISO 10646-1:2000, and the set of Chinese characters is restricted to the Chinese characters within the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) Unified Ideographs defined in ISO 10646-1:2000 or the characters included in the HKSCS published by the Government in 2001. ISO 10646-1:2000 ( commonly known as Unicode) is the universal standard for character coding in multi-language environment. While the ISO 10646-1:2000 standard encompasses characters in many other languages (for instance, Greek, Russian or Arabic characters), the set of characters to be used in electronic records shall be restricted to the CJK Unified Ideographs character set.

Manner of Delivery of Electronic Records

Electronic records can be submitted in the following manner –

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

SMTP is the standard for the protocol for the exchange of electronic mail among computer systems promulgated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Most of the common software packages for handling electronic mail, such as Netscape Communicator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, Eudora or other Unix electronic mail, etc. comply with the SMTP standard.

MIME is an extension of the SMTP protocol that enables the exchange of different kinds of data files on the Internet and S/MIME is the standard of the format of electronic mail message promulgated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). [Only those S/MIME (version 3) features that are implemented by both Microsoft Outlook Express 6.x and Mozilla Thunderbird v1.5 or above should be used.].

If digital signature is not applied, compliance with SMTP standard will suffice. If digital signature is required, compliance with S/MIME standard is necessary;

2. in physical form of 1.44MB diskette with size of 3.5 inches in MS-DOS format for files not exceeding one diskette's storage capacity. In simple terms, floppy diskettes used in the Microsoft Windows operating system environment will be accepted. For the avoidance of doubt, when floppy diskettes are produced using Macintosh operating systems, they should be produced in a format that allows reading in Microsoft Windows environment; 
   
   

3. in physical form of CD-ROM in ISO 9660 format. In simple terms, the prevalent version of CD-ROM (including read-only, write-once-read-many, and write-many-read-many CD-ROMs) can be accepted; or
   
   

4. in physical form of DVD-ROM in ISO 13346 format. In simple terms, the prevalent version of DVD-ROM (including read-only, write-once-read-many, and write-many-read-many DVD-ROMs) can be accepted.
   

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

1. Zip file (.zip), a file compression promulgated by WinZip Computing Incorporated; or

2. GNU zip file (.gz), where GNU Zip is a compression utility

File format

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:-

1. Plain text (TXT), a document format in which a sequence of characters and the words they form are encoded into computer-readable format using various types of language encoding schemes. Most of the word processing software in the market allow users to save their document as plain text. Please note that when a document is saved as plain text, special effects such as font size, boldface, italics, underline, etc. will be lost.

2. Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF), which is promulgated by Microsoft Corporation. It is supported by the majority of word processing software in the market and can be used to submit files with formatting retained.

3. Hypertext Mark Up Language Format (HTML). HTML is a document format promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium for the content on web pages. 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; or

4. Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) (compatible to Acrobat version 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8) promulgated by the Adobe Systems Incorporated. Tools can be used to convert textual documents into PDF format.

Graphic/Image File format

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

1. Encapsulated PostScript Files (EPSF) promulgated by Adobe Systems Incorporated;

2. Tag Image File Format (TIFF) promulgated by Adobe Systems Incorporated;

3. Portable Network Graphics (PNG) published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF);

4. Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) promulgated by CompuServe Incorporated; or

5. Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) promulgated by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings in electronic records shall follow the following CAD file format:–

1.  Autodesk Drawing Exchange Format (DXF) promulgated by Autodesk, Inc.
   

Digital signature

An electronic record given, presented or served under a statutory provision must be signed with a digital signature if:–

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

2. 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, the Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS#7) or PDF v1.5/1.6/1.7. 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 records and which has to be signed, each individual record shall be separately signed digitally.

Others

Electronic records given, presented or served shall not contain any computer instructions, including but not limited to:-

1. computer viruses; and

2. macros, scripts and fields that depend on the execution environment and the execution of which will cause changes to the electronic record itself or the information system displaying the electronic record.
   

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 specified above.

For submission of forms specified by the Building Authority under section 22(4) of the Buildings Ordinance (Chapter 123), the electronic records of the forms involved shall follow the Microsoft Rich Text Format only. 

Templates for Specified Forms

E-Form

For submission of the following form, the Electronic Government Forms (in the form of a software) can be used to generate electronic records and to make digital signatures. 

Last Revision Date : 9 April 2008