Chapter 10. Enabling Digital Technologies and Services

ICT as a Strategic Tool to Leapfrog the Efficiency of Tax Administrations

It was December 2019 and together with a great colleague, mentor and friend, I was facilitating sessions devoted to decisionmaking in the area of ICT, in a workshop organized by international organizations for revenue administration officials from several countries. At that time, the participants in this type of events, lived together for several days, exchanging experiences and lessons learned during breakfast, lunch, dinner and extended working sessions in teams, sprinkled with coffee and selected appetizers.  Those were other times.

Based on a common initial fictitious scenario, groups of officials simulated the information technology committee of a tax administration with limited resources. Its mission was to analyze the scenario and decide, equipped with an extensive list of suggestions, which technological products should be executed in the subsequent months. Each decision generated a new scenario, a hypothetical future which incorporated the consequences of the previous decisions. At the end of a working day, we had four decisions per group and totally different final scenarios.

In addition to the interesting conclusions regarding the characteristics of the ICT decisionmaking, something deeply called my attention: the frustration of some participants, given the little time they had to analyze the possibilities and make such important decisions. It was understandable. We had limited time, the groups were not formed by IT experts and we deliberately proposed a scenario with pressures that led to error. It was a blend that seemed improbable to some and brutally common to others.

Five months have elapsed and the workshop’s scenario seems like a stroll in the park. We are experiencing an extensive passage of “Blindness”, the novel by Saramago. The things that appeared to be simple, all of a sudden are no longer so. I saw a video of a well-known Brazilian historian and philosopher analyzing why, in spite of the alerts and signs of what would come, the virus attacked us without being prepared. After the religious and well-known reference to the frog in the boiling water he paraphrases a book by Diamond to tackle the traditional accelerators of history: “Weapons, germs and steel”. My mind takes me back to the workshop in late 2019: What if we would have based the scenario in a pandemic that would have made 60% of the world population shut themselves at home?

If there is something which this sudden crisis has put and will continue to put to test for a yet unknown time frame, is the capacity of persons, businesses and governments to rapidly adapt themselves. Such capacity is part of the modeling forces that have given life to all the technology we have, from stone-headed arrows to particle accelerators, going through, of course, the device wherein I write this text. The human capacity for adapting inexorably depends on our ability to build and use tools.

For me and so many others, the tool with which I write now has become, if it were already not so, the most powerful weapon vis-a-vis the crisis. This beautiful piece of engineering responds to numberless needs. With it, I communicate, analyze, plan and execute, generate my livelihood, have fun and of course, file and pay my taxes. My Archimedes lever has an ergonomic keyboard, “multi-touch” mouse and costs fifteen times less than the utility vehicle which is abandoned in my garage.

In this context, I recall the question of a participant in the workshop, referring to the IT committee’s work: “There are numberless options and acronyms, problems everywhere, limited time and resources … Where can one start?”

I will summarize my answer as follows: Read “ICT as a strategic tool to leapfrog the efficiency of tax administrations” especially Chapter 10, establish an IT strategic plan and set up your administration’s technological Archimedes lever. One that may allow you to sustain and integrate other technological tools, that may allow you to take advantage of the (probably few) resources which your organization may have available following this crisis, that may be designed to expand your technological coverage and adapt itself rapidly to external changes, offering totally virtual services to promote voluntary compliance and improve control, without spending years to develop them. If I would have known that today, we would be immersed in Saramago’s novel, I would add: one that may serve against weapons, germs and steel, that will allow for solving for a long time, that which is simple, basic and from there, to look forward.

“Enabling technologies” is a brief, but indispensable chapter of the new book by CIAT and the Gates foundation that will help you understand some of the necessary technological bases for your administration to take the necessary leap, in order to face the reality that is trampling us. It deals with tools that increase the administration’s capacity to rise to the challenge and build, with relative ease, savings and speediness, the great majority of the functionalities of a modern tax administration system, either from scratch or by integrating other tools.

Most probably you may have heard about information security, cryptography, symmetric and asymmetric keys, digital certificates, authentication and authorization, access control, computerized auditing registries. Most probably you already use (or under-utilize a documentary management system, an entrepreneurial contents manager, a work flow manager or a business process management suite. Most probably you may have had endless discussions about forms, digital signatures, macro-processes, processes and activities, redesign, re-engineering or continuous improvement.

Even though (and urgently if it is not so), it would be good use of your confinement time to devote some minutes to review these concepts hand in hand with the authors and understand why it is believed that these tools are a fundamental part of the “technological ecosystem” of a modern tax administration, how they should be implemented and used and what is its real potential for transforming the relationship between the taxpayer and the treasury, as well as the way of working within the administration and its levels of efficiency.

I deeply wish that once this novel is concluded and whenever weapons, germs and steel want to indulge in their own ways, your administration may have the capacity for promptly adapting itself with sound technological bases that may help your country to take care of its taxpayers and officials. So that it will not be necessary to expose oneself to tragedies for the simple lack of an autographed signature, a seal, a lost document, or deficient mechanisms for working in teams, although it may seem something taken from an apocalyptic Hollywood film, as many other things these days.

I now see an article which tells how, in the height of the pandemic, the aid for over 20 million citizens depends on some governments finding experts in COBOL (programming language which is not being taught in the universities since the 80s). My mind travels again and I cannot avoid thinking of the historian talking about the frog and the boiling water.

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