There has been a lot of overtime recently at Thailand’s Revenue Department. The agency has just concluded personal tax filings for the year, and it has been busier than ever: the total number of taxpayers has risen to around 7.4 million, up on the previous year’s total of 6.6 million. Partially as a result of this increase in the number of taxpayers, Jantima Siriseangtaksin’s 250-strong IT team have been putting in three shifts a day to provide 24-hour support to the work of the Revenue Department’s 25,000 staff. But what is putting a bounce in the step of the most sleep-deprived of her team is the success of the Revenue Department’s electronic tax filing, or e-filing. Now in its fourth year, e-filing accounts for 54 per cent of all tax returns.
E-filing has come a long way in a short time: back in 2002 the system rather publicly failed in the last two days before the tax deadline, and as a result only 69,000 taxpayers managed to file online. The second year of e-filing saw this rise to 259,000 before it jumped to 2 million in 2004. But not even Siriseangtaksin had predicted that e-filing would prove to be so popular this year.
“It has been way above my expectations this year. We had an internal target of 3.5 million, and we have managed to come in at just under 4 million,” says Siriseangtaksin. “Behind this success has been a lot of hard work. It has been a real team effort.”
According to internal estimates by the Revenue Department, each taxpayer that chooses to file online saves the government more than US$1 each. This reflects the savings from not having to manually enter data from traditional paper forms, as well as the improvement in the accuracy of the data submitted, and the handling and storage costs of taxpayer data.
Departmental agility
As Siriseangtaksin explains, the success of this year’s e-filing is attributable to steady improvements in the customer experience over the past couple of years.
Security has been a key area of focus for the Revenue Department: “It has been essential to give users of e-filing confidence in the system. Our approach has been to have ‘physical security’, which is where our system is entirely separate from the online interface. We currently use ID and password in combination with PKI, and in future we use a Certification Authority for digital signatures. On top of this, our system has comprehensive antivirus, a separate mail filter and dual firewalls.”
Another powerful motivating factor was the announcement – a month before the e-filing deadline – which all those who filed online would receive their refunds within 15 days, down from the standard 30 day refund period.
“The first time I heard about this was when our Director-General announced it publicly. When I first heard that I said ‘Wow, cannot’. But of course once it is announced publicly, it has to happen. Can you imagine the amount of change that was required to our back office systems?” laughs Siriseangtaksin. “It was a major headache for us to work out how to do it, but it served to make us very alert to external requirements.”
As Siriseangtaksin is quick to point out, the Director-General of the Revenue Department was very supportive of the IT team, making sure that they had the manpower and funding necessary to truncate the refund cycle and integrate it with the e-filing system in weeks rather than months. As part of this process the Revenue Department was able to establish a call centre helpdesk to handle the increase in citizen interactions.
“Whenever you improve service, you tend to see a rise in the number of requirements. Simply by being more accessible to the public you invite greater scrutiny,” explains Siriseangtaksin. “When you have new users a minority of them will initially require a greater degree of support. This represents great feedback for us in terms of usability. So as we have increased service to more taxpayers, we have had to invest in support to make sure that things run smoothly from the user perspective.”
Ultimately the success of the Revenue Department’s e-filing is measured in greater taxpayer compliance, Siriseangtaksin says: “Overall we now have more taxpayers filing than ever before, and we have been increasing our collection every year. This is linked to our use of technology and the improvement of our information system.”
Future plans
As you might expect, the Revenue Department has a number of pet projects in the pipeline, and Siriseangtaksin has highlighted information-sharing across departments.
“We are about to start work very soon on a project with the Commerce Department,” she says. “It is very important that we try to expand our ability to integrate with other relevant agencies.”
A new ‘E-Supervision’ system, introduced last year, will be expanded to allow Revenue Department staff to handle a higher proportion of their information handling online, reducing the amount of paperwork. All opinions and comments by tax officials will be keyed in to a single repository of taxpayer information, ensuring greater transparency and making information retrieval simpler.
Following on from the success of the Revenue Department’s e-filing helpdesk, the Revenue Department is also looking to establish a call centre.
“It is very important to try and implement a call centre this year,” she says. “We need to make it easier for taxpayers to get information using a voice interface, and we would like to see this integrated with a knowledge base, allowing staff and citizens to retrieve information from a database. The problem is how to create the database, but I think we will choose to implement the call centre at the department level, and then have this link through to the government’s national call centre.”
Peer learning
Siriseangtaksin is frank about the level of technology expertise within the agency – the Revenue Department has one of the best IT teams in the Thai public sector, having been assembled with great care by the previous Director-General who is now Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance.
“We are still sharing experience among our departments in Ministry of Finance, we let them come and look at our system often. In fact we are very open to any department in government to come and see our technology and systems in action,” she says. “But we are also open to partnering with other organizations where we lack specialised expertise.”
The Revenue Department is open to sharing its plans with vendors, and Siriseangtaksin expects this to be a dialogue whereby IT companies can brief the agency on their technology.
“I think that the Revenue Department is open-minded when it comes to technology, though to be honest when you use new technology you have to be prepared to learn together with the IT company. Which is why we don’t like to be the first people to use a technology!” she says. “Ultimately if you use old technology you tend to have problems as well, so I think you need to remain up-to-date, without sacrificing stability. Sometimes it is hard to be sure about the stability of technology, because it changes a lot. But that’s just a problem that you have to embrace if you want to use technology to help administer government!”
Autor: James Smith
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 19.07.2005
