Estonian Tax and Customs Board
Previous Central IT System of Tax and Customs Board was launched in 1997. During the following 10 years, significant changes have been taking place in legal and business environment of Estonia. Also, the requirements and the expectations about the level of the automation of the processes have been risen significantly. It became increasingly difficult to support these with the system that existed. In the beginning of 2007 the management of ETCB stated that there is urgent need to bring the public services, as well as whole reporting to the new level. In order to achieve this objective, the existing IT systems had to be significantly improved (i.e re-engineered or replaced). Icefire was chosen to carry out this really challenging task.
First stage of the project lasted 15 months and the project team consisted of 40 dedicated people both from Icefire and ETBC. During this time the major architectural shift was taking place the: old core of the tax accounting and receivables handling was completely replaced with the new one, innovative changes to fundamental business processes were introduced, (e.g. introducing common taxpayer’s prepayment account for all tax types etc.).
The project manager Jüri Kirme illustrated the whole project as follows: “We had to take a Formula 1 car, make a much more powerful engine for it and replace it during a really, really short pit stop without letting the spectators know that anything has been really changed.”
One of the most complicated tasks of the project was carrying out data migration between the old and new system. The amount of data to be migrated was huge. The database structures were really different due to the new business requirements. Data that had to be there in order to take advantage of the new functionality that was implemented, were simply missing and had to be derived using the complex algorithms during the actual migration process.
The time-table of the project was extremely tight. For instance, the implementation of the new system into the production environment, including the whole Data Migration, had to take place within only 15 days, (vast majority of the tasks between Christmas and New Year which, uniquely in 2008, had 8 consecutive holidays). As we did not have second attempt in case anything would happen, every single hour was planned very carefully. As a result, the new system went live on 5th of January with full functionality working and all the data been migrated correctly.
The project delivered two major improvements in terms of functionality. Firstly, it enabled real-time financial reporting – a very significant improvement compared to the previous one-to-two months lag. Secondly, the processes, starting from submitting the tax declarations by Tax-payer on ETBC website all the way up to the forwarding accounting entries to the state accounting system and tax income distribution, were fully automated.
According to the customer’s opinion, our major reason for the success was the ability to provide a project manager who was fulfilling two roles simultaneously: as Project Administrator and the Principal Analyst. He was managing the project and was understanding the full concept of the solution at the same time, that enabled him to sense and eliminate the possible risks of the project early enough, taking countermeasures at the time it was yet possible.
P.S. In November 10th, 2011, Finnish president Tarja Halonen announced Estonian Tax and Custom’s Board as nominee of Reward of Quality Innovation for customer’s pre-payment account in Estonian Tax System. Customer-based prepayment account enables all the liabilities of the customer to be covered with the single payment. The nominated solution was launched in 2009. In 2010, new Revenue Accounting and Debt Management System was launched.