The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has implemented a "single view of the customer" set to save it hundreds of millions of rands a year.
The project, which has been billed as a world first for a public service, has generated significant international interest, with Andre van der Post, senior manager technology innovation at SARS, currently on an international roadshow with Siebel, which developed the solution.
The solution uses an interface based on Siebel's Universal Application Network (UAN), together with a set of objects specific to SARS. It is driven by a database populated with taxpayer information and a search engine allowing for fuzzy logic searches.
Van der Post says SARS is the first public service entity to implement the UAN worldwide and also represents Siebel's biggest implementation.
He explains that SARS administers eight or nine core taxes. In the past, each tax was administered in isolation.
"A company might have several branches," he explains. "It will be registered as a taxpayer at holding level, but each branch will also be registered for VAT, PAYE, etc. In the past, each registration was viewed in isolation, thus there was no understanding of the relationships in terms of all the registrations.
"This led to inefficiency, mixed messages and mixed views."
He says a company might be owed a VAT refund, but in fact owes SARS more than that in taxes.
"We paid them the refund and then tried to chase them for the tax they owed because we didn't see both. Now we can equalise across the whole legal entity with all registrations. Before we give refunds, we can determine whether you owe us more than we owe you.
"The savings in a year are estimated at hundreds of millions of rands."
He says the solution has already provided a healthy return on investment (ROI) as the entire project, which involved technology partners Siebel, Accenture, Bateleur and IBM, cost in the region of only R60 million.
"It is estimated that we had an ROI even in the pilot phase, in just one month."
SARS can now retrieve real-time tax information per registry per entity, allowing it to match its 9.5 million taxpayers on a nightly basis.
Accessing that information in the past meant going to several systems. A task that could take about three weeks can now be executed in 30 seconds to two minutes.
Van der Post says the ability to pull vast amounts of data is due to the fact that the information is not being manipulated. "So there's no need to pump information into a staging environment."
SARS CIO Ken Jarvis has also been scheduled to deliver the keynote address at Siebel's user conference in Cannes this year.
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