Accenture Technology Vision for Revenue Agencies: Five trends shapingthe future

Accenture Technology Vision 2015Delivering Public Service for the Future

UNIVERSITY

INTRODUCTION

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Becoming digital is not about embedding digital technology within the organization. Today, it means using technology to build connections outside the organization, with partners, customers and even digital things—the “digital ecosystem.”

Revenue agencies are only beginning to tap the full potential of the digital ecosystem. Those that seize this opportunity will be the digital leaders in government. By building an ecosystem around the taxpayer, revenue agencies can provide personalized services that are truly integrated into the lives of citizens and businesses,

reducing the burden on the taxpayer and helping increase compliance and improve revenue collection.

Accenture’s Technology Vision 20151 describes five emerging technology trends that revenue agencies need to embrace in order to realize the full benefits of the digital ecosystem.

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TREND 1

Internet of Me: Personalized taxpayer services

Private sector companies are leading the way in the new “Internet of Me” era, using customer insights to design highly personalized user experiences, from web pages that reflect customers’ latest purchases to cars that learn driver’s habits.

To meet the growing expectations for more personalized experiences2, revenue agencies need to adopt a user-centric approach to designing digital services, one based on a deeper understanding of the entire taxpayer experience.

Through its sweeping digital transformation, the New Zealand Inland Revenue is building a new platform that puts taxpayers at the center of processes, enabling greater automation and more timely and coordinated communications. To complement its new platform, the agency is also evolving its digital channels to provide a more streamlined and tailored customer experience including more convenient self-service web and mobile services3.

TREND 2

Outcome Economy: Linking physical and digital to reduce compliance burden

Today, a huge proliferation of digital devices in the physical world is providing revenue agencies with new ways to reduce the compliance burden, especially for businesses. Taxpayers are ready to connect with an ecosystem of hardware devices capturing data, not only to reduce the overhead involved in compliance but also to increase their certainty with regard to tax compliance4. Revenue agencies can turn cumbersome processes into more e�cient automated transactions that reduce—or remove completely—the burden on taxpayers to provide information and help to improve tax compliance.

In Quebec5, the revenue agency requires the installation of sales recording module technology in restaurants as an anti-fraud measure to ensure all sales are reported, which it has estimated will reduce tax losses by $250 million per year.

Conceptually revenue agencies could now capture data through vehicle-tracking technologies. Rather than relying on the taxpayer to provide details of the number of miles driven to be claimed for a tax deduction, agencies could gather this information directly from a driver’s GPS data and provide them with a prepared statement.

ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY V IS ION 2015

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TREND 3

The Platform (R)evolution: Platform-based revenue agencies

With the focus on creating “zero-touch” taxation systems, new digital platforms are needed that can connect partners across the revenue ecosystem from both the public and private sector.

Using a shared digital platform, revenue agencies can enhance their collaboration with employers and other partners to allow rapid, real-time data sharing, and reduce the information burden on the taxpayer. Underpinned by new digital tools including social and mobile technologies, new platforms also enable agencies to make their digital services more accessible to taxpayers.

One example of this trend is Property Exchange Australia (PEXA), an online platform for e-conveyancing hosted in the cloud that enables participants—land registries, banks, lawyers and other financial institutions—to share all documentation needed for property transactions.

TREND 4

Intelligent Enterprise: Huge data, smarter software— improved revenue collection

The ability to capture huge amounts of data, combined with advances in processing power and data science, is already changing the way decisions are made within agencies. Increasingly, these software intelligence and analytics tools are not only helping employees making decisions but driving the decision-making process itself.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch Tax Agency developed a predictive analytics model known as Dynamic Monitoring and Debtor Insight that has improved the e�ciency of the collections process and the speed and success rate of cases handled by employees. The model continuously monitors the earnings and capital position of debtors and sends a signal to sta� if there is a change that will a�ect debtors’ ability to pay, enabling them to focus on reducing non-compliant taxpayers.

Harnessing this new level of analytics remains a challenge. Though it o�ers revenue agencies opportunities to optimize their audit, collection and other processes, its deep adoption requires significant cultural acceptance of the insights provided within the intelligent enterprise. In the longer term, this increase in “machine” intelligence will have significant implications for the auditor workforce and how manager roles are defined.

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TREND 5

CONTACT

For more information, please contact:

David ReganManaging Director Health & Public Service, Revenue Industry Leaddavid.regan@accenture.com

Connect with us to learn more on deliveringpublic service for the future on Twitter @AccenturePubSvc

About Delivering Public Service for the Future

What does it take to deliver public service for the future? Public service leaders must embrace four structural shifts—advancing toward personalised services, insight-driven operations, a public entrepreneurship mindset and a cross-agency commitment to mission productivity. By making these shifts, leaders can support flourishing societies, safe, secure nations and economic vitality for taxpayers in a digital world— delivering public service for the future.

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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY V IS ION 2015

Workforce Reimagined: Governing at the intersection of humans and machines

The push for digital services for taxpayers accelerates the need for human-machine collaboration. From advances in natural interfaces to wearable devices and smart machines, revenue agencies have increasing opportunities to empower their workforce through technology.

Revenue agencies are today working side by side with intelligent technology. Within the New Zealand Inland Revenue and Australian Tax O�ce, call center employees are using voice recognition software to authenticate callers. Introduced in New Zealand in 2012, the biometrics service has reduced average call resolution times by one minute as employees no longer have to ask questions to verify a caller’s identity if they have registered with the service. Approximately 2.5 million customers contact the New Zealand Inland Revenue on a regular basis of whom 1 million have registered for the new service6.

Delivering public service for the future

As these trends show, revenue agencies can harness the new wave of digital technologies to support the shift to more personalized services. Building a digital ecosystem with taxpayers, third parties, and other agencies and governments enables agencies to increase collaboration and data sharing, reduce the burden on the taxpayer and increase compliance.

By placing themselves at the center of the digital ecosystem, revenue agencies can take the next step in delivering public service for the future to provide taxpayers with the services they want.

METHODOLOGY

REFERENCES

Every year, the Technology Vision team collaborates with Accenture Research to pinpoint the emerging IT developments that will have the greatest impact on companies, government agencies, and other organizations in the next three to five years. The research process this year began with gathering inputs from the Technology Vision External Advisory Board, a group comprising of more than two dozen executives and entrepreneurs from the public and private sectors, academia, venture capital and startup companies. In addition, the Technology Vision team conducted nearly 100 interviews with technology luminaries, industry experts and Accenture business leaders. The team also tapped into the vast pool of knowledge and innovative ideas from professionals across Accenture, using Accenture’s collaboration technologies and a crowdsourcing approach to launch and run an online contest to uncover the most interesting emerging technology themes. Over 1,700 participants actively engaged in the contest, contributing valuable ideas and voting on others’ inputs.

Accenture Technology Vision 2015 Survey Demographics

This year, Accenture conducted the first Technology Vision survey, polling 2,000 business and technology executives— including 162 public service leaders— across nine countries and 10 industries, in order to understand key technology challenges as well as priority investments. The goals: to understand their perspectives on key technology challenges they face, and to identify their priority investments over the next few years.

Copyright © 2015 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

This survey was fielded from December 2014 through January 2015 in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Respondentsincluded IT Directors (24 percent), Function Heads (15 percent), CTOs or Chief Mobility O�cers (13 percent), CIOs or Directors of Technology (13 percent), CMOs (9 percent), Line of Business Heads (9 percent) and CSOs (4 percent).

To learn more and read the full Accenture Technology Vision 2015 report, please go to accenture.com/technologyvision.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 319,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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1 Accenture Technology Vision 2015: “Digital Business Era: Stretch Your Boundaries”2 Accenture “Transforming Revenue Agencies: Evolving Digital Strategies to Meet Taxpayer Expectations”3 http://www.ird.govt.nz/transformation/about-business-transformation/4 Accenture Research 5 Revenu Québec, “Mandatory Billing in the Restaurant Sector: www.revenuquebec.ca/en/entreprises/obligationsparticulieres/restauration/default.aspx6 http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/546287/inland_revenue_department_nz_talks_voice_biometrics/