Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is the department of the UK Government responsible for the collection of taxes, the payment of state support and the administration of other regulatory regimes.
HMRC was formed by the merger of the Inland Revenue and Her Majesty's Customs and Excise.


Case studies

VAT Registration Transformation project — involving ITSD (Accenture & HMRC) and Aspire (Capgemini & HMRC)

  • Situation

    • Prior to transformation, the issuance of a VAT certificate following a new trader registration was taking around 21 working days, whether the application was made on paper or through the citizen-facing web interface. The provision of a VAT Registration Number for new businesses is crucial because they cannot charge VAT until they receive this number.
    A project was initiated in order to reduce this lead time to 3 working days for 90% of applications. Corollary of this goal was to significantly reduce the processing time of any type of operation involving VAT: Registrations, Deregistrations, Non-registrations, Variations & Transfers.

  • Task

    • The project involved the introduction of a new citizen-facing web interface, automated processing and a business rules engine, which could analyse the user's VAT application and associated enrichment data using near-natural English rules to determine the action for the system to take; OPA was to be integrated with SAP's Enterprise Tax Management Platform.

  • Actions

    • An Oracle Policy Automation subject matter expert came on board with the responsibility to handle the development effort of the rules engine and to provide guidance on technical integration. As the lead rules developer, he enabled and managed 3 resources at HMRC, and was in charge of impacting new requirements, distributing the workload and developing complex rules.
    An agile approach was put in place to cope with 40-odd successive versions of source material.
    To perfect the coherence and completeness of the rulebase, the OPA consultant was chairing frequent joint application development and unit testing sessions.
    He also took the initiative to design process documents and templates to facilitate performance testing and technical integration.

  • Results

    • Several versions of the rulebase were successfully designed, developed, tested and released against tight deadlines. The complete version enabled both HMRC agents and the public (business owners, VAT agents) to use their own web portal for their VAT operations.
    Throughout a process of enablement, internal HMRC OPA developers were mentored, assigned work, debugged and trained on an ad-hoc basis, so as to enable them to update the business rules when needed in the future.


Ceased Employment Worklist project — involving Aspire (Capgemini & HMRC)

  • Situation

    • HMRC's Benefits & Credits agents were following a long and complex procedure to deal with the claims they received; this was prone to human errors and delays in processing the claims.
    Within the scope of the One Click programme at HMRC, the Ceased Employment Worklist had to be improved to reduce errors and processing time.

  • Task

    • The solution revolved around an internal web portal utilising a business rules engine to guide the HMRC agents through a screen flow. In essence, they would be presented with the next actions to take depending on the answers they would provide on the screens, whose sequence would be determined by the business rules.

  • Actions

    • 2 Oracle Policy Automation consultants were brought on board to write the business rules, design the OPA question screens and arrange their sequence.
    As a data feed was augmenting the user inputs during each session, advanced screen flows had to be used in order to cope with uncertainties appertaining to 'unknown' data. This also led to updating the original requirements (source material) in collaboration with the process owners at HMRC, via an iterative approach (based on our own adaptation of the Dynamic Systems Development Method — an agile framework — to OPA).

  • Results

    • The rulebase was delivered on time and utilised by HMRC.
    Guidance, best practice and training on screen flows was provided to HMRC rule developers, to adjust the rules, screens and screen flows as they see fit in the future.