Outgoing HMRC CIO Mark Hall scopes out the challenges for Mark Dearnley
Dearnley to lead the way to full digitisation as HMRC adopts 'systems and service integrator' model ahead of 2017 Aspire outsourcing contract renewal
HMRC's outgoing CIO Mark Hall has mapped out the major challenges that will be facing new CIO Mark Dearnley when he arrives in October from Vodafone.
Dearnley, whose official title will be chief digital and information officer, will lead the organisation through its transformation into a "systems and service integrator" model.
HMRC is currently working through a major campaign of systems consolidation that will see the number of systems serving the former Customs & Excise side of the organisation cut by 300. It follows a series of consolidation projects of former Inland Revenue systems, merging multiple disparate tax systems to run on common, typically SAP-based tax platforms.
In addition to cutting costs, says Hall, part of the aim of the consolidation programmes has been to clear the way to put more and more taxes online, in a more integrated manner - providing the foundation for a more cloud-like transformation of HMRC's IT as the 2017 date for the renewal of the Aspire outsourcing contract looms.
"We already have 200 online services. These are primarily targeted at business 'customers'. They are things like VAT, for example, or they are targeting things like self-assessment. Our ambition is to consolidate them even further and start to look at individual and personal taxpayers in the next wave of digitisation," says Hall.
Those plans to further digitise the UK's many different taxation systems will be part-financed by a £200m, three-year investment plan announced in June. Under this plan, the hope is that the digitisation process will cut the number of paper filings and phone calls taxpayers have to make to HMRC and, therefore, will eventually save some £50m annually in administrative costs.
"Going forward, we will be targeting our personal tax customers more. We have four key exemplar projects we are running in this area. The first one is PAYE [pay as you earn] online, which will ultimately deliver an online service to 39 million individual taxpayers," says Hall.
That would encompass the digitisation of the tax code process: instead of sending out millions of letters every April with people's tax code, it could be done online via a portal or sent by email, as well as the communication of other personal tax information.
"You could go online to inform us that you have got a new company car, for example, so the service is targeted at providing the information you already get on paper, but in an online experience, and giving people a simple route to log simple changes and changes of circumstances," says Hall.
He continues: "The second one is called 'My Tax for Business', which will provide an online portal for business so that they can see all of their taxes in one place - a bit like online banking... If you're a business, you will be able to go into one place and administer all your taxes from one place."
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Outgoing HMRC CIO Mark Hall scopes out the challenges for Mark Dearnley
Dearnley to lead the way to full digitisation as HMRC adopts 'systems and service integrator' model ahead of 2017 Aspire outsourcing contract renewal
Given the number of different taxes that are levied on, well, everything and everyone in the UK, bringing them all together within one portal will be no mean feat.
"The third one is paperless self-assessment. Self-assessment is already online, but you still receive a piece of paper asking you to file," says Hall. HMRC is looking to take the paper and, perhaps most important of all in terms of cost-reduction, the postage out of this process.
"The final one is for agents and intermediaries, to enable them to act and support their customers in a similar way. As their customers have moved online, we need to move agents online as well - enabling the agents to do the same thing as their clients," says Hall.
Online to real-time
These projects will follow swiftly on from the real-time information (RTI) project that is currently being rolled out. Under RTI Employers will send PAYE data electronically to HMRC each time they pay their employees as part of routine payroll processes, rather than sending a separate return at the end of the year.
The returns will include details of their employees' pay, tax and deductions. This will provide the foundation for online PAYE project that HMRC will shortly be commencing.
The RTI project, says, Hall, is "absolutely on track". More than 1.6 million PAYE schemes have successfully started to report in real time, says Hall, which is more than 85% of the total and accounting for more than 31.4 million individual employments. This, claims Hall, is at the top end of HMRC's expectations.
All these projects have been conducted under the auspices of the Aspire mega-outsourcing contract - the mega-deal with Capgemini, which is the lead contractor. This outsourcing deal brought together both the IT of the old Inland Revenue, which was outsourced in the 1990s to EDS (now part of Hewlett-Packard) and Customs & Excise.
See the next issue of Computing to find out how HMRC is moving from a monolithic IT systems architecture to a "multi-sourced model" with an integrator and multiple suppliers.
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