HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) announced earlier this month that it will bring some existing IT services under its direct control, while it continues to plan the transition to a new IT delivery model following the ending of the Aspire contract in 2017.
These changes will ultimately enable HMRC to make savings of up to 24 per cent on its £800m annual IT budget by 2020-21 while maintaining consistent delivery of services to customers.
Mark Dearnley, HMRC’s Chief Digital and Information Officer, said:
“We have an ambitious digital vision – to transform our IT services and use the data we hold in smarter ways, so we can deliver world-beating digital services for our customers and colleagues.
The changes we’re announcing today will allow us to maintain consistency of service for customers while we plan for the future which, as now, will include a mixed model of both internal and external delivery using multiple partners.”
HMRC also announced that Capgemini would be providing ‘test and release’ services until 2020, to provide vital quality assurance during the digital transformation.
HMRC has already launched online services that are quicker, lower cost and have tax compliance and security built-in. New Personal and Business Tax Accounts – which work like online bank accounts, allowing customers to deal with all their tax affairs in one place – will be available to ten million personal customers and five million businesses respectively by early 2016.
The UK tax authority has a network of Delivery Centres – hi-tech innovation hubs, based across the UK – which developed an online tax credit renewals service used this year by more than 750,000 tax payers. Apparently, customer satisfaction rates have reached 90 per cent.