2001 has been a very successful year for Bull Information Technology Southern Africa (BITSA) in the tax arena. BITSA operates in the Southern and Eastern African region, including Ghana and Nigeria, where three major systems integration deals have been concluded, collectively worth over $2 million.
BITSA recently signed contracts with the Revenue Authorities of Malawi, Ethiopia and Zambia to implement tax systems within these organisations, following the successful completion in 1999 of its first project in this field at the Namibian Inland Revenue Department.
In Malawi and Ethiopia, BITSA is developing and implementing an automated computerised Taxpayer Registration system that manages the registration of new taxpayers as well as of existing taxpayer data, and assigns a single Tax Identification Number (TIN) to taxpayers, thereby speeding up the registration process. In Zambia, as already done in Namibia, Bull is further implementing a comprehensive tax administration system that includes the registration module as well as VAT, Income Tax, Employee Tax, Withholding Taxes and Provisional Taxes. The Zambian tax system is based on a Windows 2000 operating system over an Intranet on an Oracle database. The system is developed in Oracle Forms, and is well suited to all countries having a tax system based on the Commonwealth Tax Regime.
Bi-lateral funding has enabled the Malawian and Zambian Revenue Authorities to launch their tax projects, whereas the Federal Inland Revenue Authority of Ethiopia has obtained their funding from the Ethiopian Government. In each country BITSA is acting as prime contractor with local and international partners providing hardware, communication and logistical services. A South African partner, QBCon, has been enlisted to develop and customise the tax system to suit the requirements of each Revenue Authority. Oracle MidAfrica is providing the database and development technology.
Christine Ranarivelo, General Manager of BITSA, attributes this success to a very focused sales strategy directed at Tax Authorities and Ministries of Finance in Africa, and world-class project management and IT skills.
Groupe Bull is an international information technology company with customers in more than 100 countries. In 2000, the company earned revenues of 3.244 billion euros. Bull`s strategy is to concentrate on the Internet and electronic business and is offering a wide range of systems, infrastructure software and IT services directly via its own integration expertise or through alliances with the world`s best IT partners.
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