FOD Financiën/SPF Finances: ongoing digital transformation for the benefit of citizens and employees

Modern and agile tax services must respond effectively to ever-changing economic challenges. Their ability to innovate and stay ahead of market changes ensures an agile globalized governance of the tax collection process.

Context

The taxation services of Belgium, FOD Financiën/SPF Finances, and its 30,000 employees manage the tax collection of individuals and companies across the country. Taxation has always been a complicated, extensive, and constantly changing process. This process is dependent on the political, economic, and even ecological agenda, creating a constantly changing taxation environment. Previously the implementations, to align with these different agenda, had a considerable impact on the tax teams and the ICT department. System changes were very time-consuming and labor-intensive to implement. In a rapidly changing economy, this situation had to change. The FOD Financiën/SPF Finances has therefore undertaken an evolution of its organization and its applications to be able to respond in a more agile manner to these challenges, in which Sopra Steria has played (and still plays) a major role.

The contribution of Sopra Steria

Over the years, FOD Financiën/SPF Finances has relied on the expertise of Sopra Steria through various contracts. These have involved the redesign of processes and applications, architecture design and application reengineering. They were adapted to allow modifications in respond to changes in business rules and special attention was paid to the user experience. Changes that need to be implemented, triggered by new regulations and laws, can be rolled out within a month (which is a lot faster than before) Additionally, FOD Financiën/SPF Finances asked Sopra Steria to assist in the re-design of the architecture of the applications to obtain greater scalability and hybrid cloud deployment. This has been realized through the decomposition into (API-driven) services and containerization, where we re-use existing building blocks for different applications and link to existing services without developing them from scratch. The benefit to the FOD Financiën/SPF Finances is the increase of development efficiency and the decrease of maintenance effort. We also play a crucial role in securing and managing the massive and continuous daily inflow of data. Our dedicated and stable teams over time have become experts in the domain subject and the supporting systems. Our experts help FOD Financiën/SPF Finances to adjust these systems constantly to external factors where needed, making sure the ecosystem of applications works flawlessly, internally as well towards the citizens and other administrations.

The added value of Sopra Steria

Changing the FOD Financiën/SPF Finance's IT systems enable greater agility to adapt when changes in legislation and services occur. This allows inspectors and employees to focus on more important value-added tasks in the domain subject, increasing overall productivity. In the end, belgian citizens will benefit from better overall services from the FOD Financiën/ SPF Finance, in addition to the improved digital services they already enjoy today. As a result of the successful long-term relationship with Sopra Steria, FOD Financiën/SPF Finances is now better equipped for the future with technology landscape that enables them to adapt and grow with them as needed