Risk Analysis, or how to Avoid Contact with Most of Your Customers

In autumn 2000 Revenue in Ireland launched the Revenue On-Line Service, ROS, an Internet based system for filing tax returns, making payments and viewing customer information. In the years since then the Service has been extended to embrace most taxheads and provide relevant on-line facilities for most taxpayers and their agents. The introduction of ROS had critical business implications: how to identify customers on the net, how to enable someone else file on their behalf, how to legislate for the virtual world of the internet, and how, given that all data was now processed electronically, to conduct the business of reviews, checks and audits. One of the main criteria in designing ROS was to ensure we did not try to recreate in an electronic world how things had been done in the paper one. We introduced digital signatures, did away with attachments to returns, removed all references to signatures and paper from legislation and decided to abandon traditional manual screening for audit in favour of electronic analysis. This move, therefore, provided opportunities for re-engineering how Revenue dealt with non-compliance. Not only were we able to electronically screen returns, but we could do so over several years of data. We could cross reference information including that from third party sources. We could look at customers' payment and filing records to see what sort of compliance histories they had. And, we could look at the complete customer base. This enabled us identify the huge sector of our customer base who are largely compliant and with whom we wanted limited contact. (Reducing contact with customers and making it easy for them to comply is a key element of most eGovernment strategies.) These developments took place against a move by Revenue to what is called Whole Case Management, a structural change to ensure a customer was dealt with in one office only, and an administrative change to ensure a customer's affairs were reviewed in total when required to minimize contact from Revenue. Developing an electronic risk analysis system is a project. Implementing the change by which to harness it effectively is a major challenge. This paper sets out the issues we faced in trying to bring about this change. These are common issues that will confront any organization heading down this route, but at the heart of eGovernment is minimising contact with most of our customers. Risk analysis is a means by which to do this.