A national revenue collection agency needed to process millions of transactions more efficiently, improve collections and make its services easier to use.
Achieving this meant replacing labour-intensive administration with connected, automated processes while keeping essential services running.
The public sector organisation partnered with BBD to support a sustained modernisation programme across tax administration, payments, debt management, compliance and customs. Working alongside its teams for nearly two decades, BBD has helped design, develop and integrate critical platforms supporting these operations.
Objectives
- Automate high-volume assessment and administration processes to increase capacity and reduce turnaround times
- Simplify interactions for taxpayers and businesses through integrated digital services
- Strengthen collections through better coordination of data, decisions and recovery processes
- Provide a configurable risk-modelling framework to support better risk detection and help specialist teams focus on complex and high-er-risk cases
- Connect legacy and modern systems while maintaining operational continuity
- Establish reusable capabilities that could support successive modernisation initiatives
Benefits
Across the wider modernisation programme and specific initiatives supported by BBD, the organisation achieved:
- Personal income tax assessment processing progressed from an average of 180 days in 2006 to 0.22 days in 2019, subsequently reaching 3 seconds. Today, automatic assessments reduce the need for millions of eligible taxpayers to complete and submit returns
- A 98.26% acceptance rate among standard taxpayers receiving automatic assessments in 2024/25
- A tenfold improvement compared to the manual process and an estimated saving of over 60 000 person-hours through a focused debt-management initiative
- Automated risk-based selection of 100% of standard verification cases and 88.41% of complex audit cases in 2024/25
- More coordinated processing across assessments, payments, disputes, collections and customs
The opportunity
The organisation’s operating environment combined established legacy systems with newer applications supporting different business functions. Modernisation required these systems to work together across processes that frequently involved multiple teams, decisions and points of interaction.
There was significant scope to reduce manual administration by making better use of information already available to the organisation. Trusted third-party data could support pre-populated returns and automatic assessments, while integrated workflows could coordinate the actions required for compliance and collection.
The opportunity was to build this capability across the organisation, allowing routine work to progress automatically and giving specialists more capacity for cases requiring investigation or judgement.
Approach
BBD worked alongside the organisation’s teams to translate business requirements into technical designs and operational solutions. The work combined business analysis, architecture, custom software development and integration, supported by detailed knowledge of the organisation’s processes and systems.
Existing technology investments were retained where feasible and connected to new capabilities. Enterprise integration, transaction orchestration and workflow components provided shared functionality that could be applied across multiple business areas.
Operational continuity remained central to delivery. Solutions needed to function within the existing environment and support essential services as modernisation progressed.
The long-standing partnership also enabled teams to respond to evolving requirements. Experience across the organisation’s systems and business processes helped BBD assess how changes would affect connected services and adapt delivery accordingly.
Overview of the solution
BBD’s contribution spans enterprise integration, high-volume transaction orchestration, workflow and case management, and digital services for taxpayers and traders. Together, these capabilities connect information and processing across registration, assessments, payments, refunds, disputes and collections.
For third-party information processing, BBD delivered integration capabilities that securely ingest, validate and process data. This supports an information ecosystem through which the organisation collected more than 160 million records in 2024/25. Validated information is made available for pre-populated returns, assessments and compliance processes.
BBD then developed the orchestration connecting the organisation’s pre-population engine with its taxpayer-facing channels. Information already held by the organisation could be presented for review, reducing repeated data capture and simplifying the filing process.
For automatic assessments, BBD delivered the platform coordinating the process across multiple systems. It connects trusted data with calculation and eligibility services, manages workflow and exceptions, and coordinates assessment generation, notifications and downstream payment processes. This enables millions of eligible taxpayers to receive assessments without submitting a return where the information is complete and correct.
BBD supplied a configurable risk-modelling framework and supported the organisation’s risk teams in developing automated compliance capabilities. The framework applies defined risk and compliance rules to taxpayer and third-party information, helping automate routine interventions and allowing specialists to concentrate on complex and higher-risk cases.
In debt management, BBD delivered significant elements of the collection and recovery workflows, including payment arrangements, taxpayer engagement and integration between the systems involved in collection activity.
The programme extends into customs and excise, with BBD delivering components supporting declarations, trader registration, billing, cargo processing, inspection workflows and case management. Integration with financial and border systems supports more coordinated processing and risk-based intervention.
Debt-management results
A recent initiative demonstrates the operational impact of this work.
A five-person BBD team supported the delivery of debt-management automation within a few weeks, working through a highly fluid scope and a significant volume of change. The team adapted as requirements evolved, helping the organisation put the capability into operation quickly.
In less than a month, the initiative issued more than 69 000 automated third-party appointments, a mechanism used to recover outstanding tax debt. It achieved a 34% payment conversion rate, delivered a tenfold improvement compared with the manual process and is estimated to have saved over 60 000 person-hours.
The initiative shows how a small team with relevant engineering expertise and detailed knowledge of the operating environment can help deliver substantial gains in collection capacity and reduce labour-intensive administration.
Technology highlights
- Enterprise integration across legacy and modern application environments
- High-volume transaction orchestration and automated processing
- Third-party data ingestion, validation and transformation
- Enterprise workflow and case management
- Configurable business rules and risk-modelling capabilities
- Integration with digital and assisted service channels
Impact of BBD’s partnership
BBD has helped the organisation transform its capacity to deliver essential services at national scale. Millions of assessments now happen automatically, while integrated compliance and collection processes reduce the manual effort needed to act on outstanding obligations. For the organisation, this creates more capacity to pursue complex cases. For taxpayers and businesses, it reduces the work involved in meeting their obligations.
The sustained partnership has also helped the organisation translate new requirements into results. Established platforms, combined with detailed knowledge of its systems and operations, give delivery teams capabilities they can build on. The recent debt-management initiative demonstrates the value of that accumulated expertise: a small team adapting to substantial change and helping deliver measurable operational gains within weeks.
The organisation’s modernisation achievements have earned industry and international recognition, including awards for automatic assessments and customs innovation. BBD’s engineering contribution has supported this progress over nearly two decades, helping the organisation turn successive technology investments into lasting improvements in service and operational performance.
