By Ann Rettie
Managing Partner, Accenture's Global Revenue and Customs Group

Revenue agencies are high-profile, touching the lives of nearly every member of the community and every business in a country. Not surprisingly, expectations of revenue agencies have always been rather high. Consequently, these agencies have often been ahead of other agencies in reinventing processes and leveraging information technology for major productivity gains, redefining service delivery and taxpayers as customers, and adopting new channels such as call centers and Internet transactions.

The current global environment will require revenue agencies to tap into that innovative spirit to an even greater degree. To achieve high performance, governments today are expected to improve service in the face of such pressures as tightening budgets, difficulty attracting and retaining skilled labor resources and regulatory reform. To close the gap between their current performance and their potential, governments must aspire to high performance – delivering greater outcomes with the same or fewer resources.

How will they do it? Many have been migrating in that direction for years. In the 1990s, revenue agencies generally focused on internal improvements such as process efficiency and achieving an integrated view of their clients’ information and accounts.

That focus has shifted over time. In the early 2000s, agencies began to concentrate on improving their external side – their relationship with clients and the service they provide to them. Typically, they accomplished this by implementing call centers and online services and by improving compliance actions. Today, advanced revenue agencies think of taxpayers as their customers, offering them a choice of convenient channels that make it easy to comply and using customer relationship management to manage customer compliance and interaction.

What is next? In the future, we see this focus evolving even further. Through findings from our research into high-performance governments, we believe that by 2010 leading revenue agencies will deliver greater public sector value than ever before by building more-proactive, less-intrusive relationships with the community. (See “The Accenture Sector Value Model.”)

From our work with revenue agencies around the world, Accenture has defined the key outcomes that constitute public sector value delivery for revenue agencies:

• Maximize revenue. Assess and collect tax due equitably and fairly under the law.
• Maximize compliance. Maximize the ratio of taxpayers who file and pay voluntarily and correctly through effective public outreach, education, customer service and compliance programs.
• Minimize the burden on taxpayers. Minimize the amount of time and degree of difficulty involved for taxpayers in meeting their obligations. Make timely payments of refunds and grants.
• Maximize responsiveness to stakeholders. Maximize the quality of assistance provided to taxpayers to help them comply with their obligations, and effectively resolve questions and issues.
• Improve cost effectiveness. Optimize productivity by balancing the outcomes listed above with cost.

Leading revenue agencies will seek to deliver greater public sector value to their stakeholders by generating improved outcomes in a more cost-effective way.

In this inaugural edition of Revenue Matters: Achieving High Performance Under Taxing Circumstances, we explore each of the public sector value outcomes from a variety of perspectives. Agencies from around the world share their stories about what they are doing to increase compliance, improve customer responsiveness and transform agency operations. Industry experts offer perspectives on emerging trends such as the increased use of data analytics, emerging channels for interaction with taxpayers and new types of collaboration among government entities. In addition, we explore tax reform in developing countries and innovations in procurement. We hope you find this book informative and thought-provoking and that you come away with practical ideas for how you can put your agency on the road to high performance.