The Irish Revenue Commissioners Consolidates
its Databases Using Innovative's Solutions |
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| The Office of The Revenue Commissioners (Revenue) is responsible for tax administration in the Republic of Ireland. It manages both the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise aspects. Additionally, Revenue carries out agency work on behalf of other government agencies, such as collecting Pay Related Social Insurance charges. |
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| In a recent year, gross tax payments of IR£14 Billion were administered by a staff of 6,000 across some 130 sites. This represents an enormous challenge in processing transactions accurately and quickly, as well as handling customer inquires satisfactorily. |
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The Role of Technology
Information Technology is vital to the efficient operation of Revenue. Each day large numbers of return forms, payments, notices and repayments are processed by the existing systems. The up-to-date status of each taxpayer needs to be available to tax offices around the country. This is provided speedily and securely via some 4,000 personal computers and 2,000 terminals linked to large-scale enterprise servers. |
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Strategic Direction
While the existing tax-by-tax approach operates well, Revenue is evolving its systems to present a unified customer view from any point in the organization. This is in line with progressive tax administrations worldwide, where business processes based around a single integrated systems architecture and database have proven to be the best approach to improving tax yield, ensuring compliance and providing the flexibility to respond to an ever changing environment. |
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| Revenue's new system, called CONTAX (a Consolidated Approach to Taxation) is being implemented over a number of years. Components for taxpayer registration, exception case tracking and management information are already in production. These complement traditional transaction-based facilities with improved decision support and case-working capabilities for front-line staff, knowledge workers and management. The current focus of CONTAX is on building the integrated financial and accounting components. |
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Implementation
One key foundation phase of CONTAX was the consolidation of the eight major tax registration databases into one common, centralized database. These tax files had been built up over the previous 20 years, to varying user requirements and using a variety of mainframe technologies. To give an idea of the complexity of this conversion, prior to a specific date, customers could have different registration numbers for the various taxes. This made name and address matching an important requirement. |
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| To achieve consolidation in an economical and timely manner, Revenue realized that they would need help from a specialist company to complement their in-house IT resource. Following an open tender process, Innovative Systems' solution was selected. Innovative's standardization and linking software and expertise provided a way of standardizing the registration data from the existing systems prior to running it through sophisticated matching algorithms, and of automating as far as possible the matching process. Revenue's IS Division built the pre- and post-standardization and linking routines, including the final consolidation and conversion process, as well as the essential ongoing maintenance procedures which catered for live changes made after data clean up but before implementation. Innovative converted its software to run on Revenue's Groupe Bull mainframes and also provided on-site help in the use of their standardization and linking products.” |
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| The consolidation project took place over two years, on a cumulative tax-by-tax basis. The smaller tax files were used as a starting point for quick verification that the results were as expected. Significant user resources were employed by the Chief Inspector's Office of Revenue to verify 'suspect' links identified by the software. While this was being done, a joint business/technical team built the new Common Registration System (CRS), which is now used to maintain the consolidated registration data. |
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| This phase of the CONTAX project was completed with a fully consolidated database of approximately 2.8 million customers. |
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Taxpayer Identification
One of the most difficult things to achieve in any customer database is rapid identification of an individual's details where a reference number is not available. This is not a trivial issue in view of the lack of postal codes, as well as the difference in address structures between urban and rural Ireland. Revenue wanted to provide staff with the ability to identify any taxpayer on the CRS rapidly and accurately using any combination of name and address. |
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A Partnership Approach
Revenue decided that Innovative's online change management capability was most suited to this task. As with the standardization and linking software, this would be wrapped in locally developed software to handle the screen and database aspects of the solution. To ensure a smooth implementation, a team was created which had good knowledge of Revenue's procedures as well as good product understanding. Innovative staff and Revenue's IS Division worked closely together to define search functionality and key structure requirements. The project was monitored closely by Innovative's product development team, which allowed intelligent adaptation of the product to meet Revenue's specific requirements, and the incorporation of more generic enhancements into the standard product. |
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| "For front office staff, CRS-Search with Innovative's online search engine has been a key addition to their customer service and compliance facilities, providing an instant response in a busy, live environment," said Liam Ryan, of the Office of Revenue Commissioners. |
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Results
The CRS, including its new CRS-Search component, was launched successfully. It has been well received by the user community and has contributed to improved customer service. Further, Innovative's online change management capability has been incorporated into the ongoing CRS name and address registration and amendment procedures, thereby avoiding duplication of customer records. Also, it aids data quality by ensuring that key address lines are entered. |
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What Next?
Currently, Revenue is incorporating another large file into the CRS-Search system. This file will have some 4 million records. Also, as part of its tax compliance programs, Revenue is developing an off-line matching system using Innovative's online search engine at its core. This system enables matching of internal business unit files and external files containing name and address information against the corporate registration database. Innovative's online search engine allows users to identify customers quickly and accurately. It uses a sophisticated key building and matching algorithm to give users the best chance of locating the target record. |
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| It is an online facility which: |
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can cut customer service response time dramatically |
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prevents duplicate customer entries |
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reduces need for back office review and management |
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ensures consistent and current customer updates |
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provides compatibility with most operating system environments |
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maintains and enforces customer database integrity standards |
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| Further, Innovative's online change management capability can be used in batch mode to integrate purchased lists and other external information, and to automate overnight batch processing of daily additions and changes to your customer database. |
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