1. Accenture
Technology Vision
for Revenue
Agencies: Five
trends shaping
the future
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Delivering Public Service for the Future
UNIVERSITY

2. INTRODUCTION
#techvision2015
2
Becoming digital is not about
embedding digital technology
within the organization. Today,
it means using technology to
build connections outside the
organization, with partners,
customers and even digital
things—the “digital ecosystem.”
Revenue agencies are only
beginning to tap the full potential
of the digital ecosystem. Those
that seize this opportunity will be
the digital leaders in government.
By building an ecosystem around
the taxpayer, revenue agencies can
provide personalized services that
are truly integrated into the lives
of citizens and businesses,
reducing the burden on the taxpayer and
helping increase compliance and
improve revenue collection.
Accenture’s Technology Vision 20151
describes five emerging technology
trends that revenue agencies need to
embrace in order to realize the full
benefits of the digital ecosystem.

3. 3
TREND 1
Internet of Me:
Personalized taxpayer services
Private sector companies are leading the way in the
new “Internet of Me” era, using customer insights
to design highly personalized user experiences,
from web pages that reflect customers’ latest
purchases to cars that learn driver’s habits.
To meet the growing expectations for more
personalized experiences2
, revenue agencies need
to adopt a user-centric approach to designing
digital services, one based on a deeper
understanding of the entire taxpayer experience.
Through its sweeping digital transformation, the
New Zealand Inland Revenue is building a new
platform that puts taxpayers at the center of
processes, enabling greater automation and more
timely and coordinated communications. To
complement its new platform, the agency is also
evolving its digital channels to provide a more
streamlined and tailored customer experience
including more convenient self-service web and
mobile services3
.
TREND 2
Outcome Economy:
Linking physical and digital to
reduce compliance burden
Today, a huge proliferation of digital devices in the
physical world is providing revenue agencies with
new ways to reduce the compliance burden,
especially for businesses. Taxpayers are ready to
connect with an ecosystem of hardware devices
capturing data, not only to reduce the overhead
involved in compliance but also to increase their
certainty with regard to tax compliance4
. Revenue
agencies can turn cumbersome processes into more
efficient automated transactions that reduce—or
remove completely—the burden on taxpayers to
provide information and help to improve tax
compliance.
In Quebec5
, the revenue agency requires the
installation of sales recording module technology
in restaurants as an anti-fraud measure to ensure
all sales are reported, which it has estimated will
reduce tax losses by $250 million per year.
Conceptually revenue agencies could now capture
data through vehicle-tracking technologies. Rather
than relying on the taxpayer to provide details of
the number of miles driven to be claimed for a tax
deduction, agencies could gather this information
directly from a driver’s GPS data and provide them
with a prepared statement.
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015

4. 4
TREND 3
The Platform (R)evolution:
Platform-based revenue agencies
With the focus on creating “zero-touch” taxation
systems, new digital platforms are needed that can
connect partners across the revenue ecosystem
from both the public and private sector.
Using a shared digital platform, revenue agencies
can enhance their collaboration with employers
and other partners to allow rapid, real-time data
sharing, and reduce the information burden on the
taxpayer. Underpinned by new digital tools
including social and mobile technologies, new
platforms also enable agencies to make their digital
services more accessible to taxpayers.
One example of this trend is Property Exchange
Australia (PEXA), an online platform for
e-conveyancing hosted in the cloud that enables
participants—land registries, banks, lawyers and
other financial institutions—to share all
documentation needed for property transactions.
TREND 4
Intelligent Enterprise:
Huge data, smarter software—
improved revenue collection
The ability to capture huge amounts of data,
combined with advances in processing power and
data science, is already changing the way decisions
are made within agencies. Increasingly, these
software intelligence and analytics tools are not
only helping employees making decisions but
driving the decision-making process itself.
In the Netherlands, the Dutch Tax Agency
developed a predictive analytics model known as
Dynamic Monitoring and Debtor Insight that has
improved the efficiency of the collections process
and the speed and success rate of cases handled by
employees. The model continuously monitors the
earnings and capital position of debtors and sends
a signal to staff if there is a change that will affect
debtors’ ability to pay, enabling them to focus on
reducing non-compliant taxpayers.
Harnessing this new level of analytics remains a
challenge. Though it offers revenue agencies
opportunities to optimize their audit, collection and
other processes, its deep adoption requires
significant cultural acceptance of the insights
provided within the intelligent enterprise. In the
longer term, this increase in “machine” intelligence
will have significant implications for the auditor
workforce and how manager roles are defined.
#techvision2015

5. TREND 5
CONTACT
For more information,
please contact:
David Regan
Managing Director
Health & Public Service, Revenue Industry Lead
david.regan@accenture.com
Connect with us to learn more on delivering
public service for the future on Twitter
@AccenturePubSvc
About Delivering Public Service for
the Future
What does it take to deliver public service for the
future? Public service leaders must embrace four
structural shifts—advancing toward personalised
services, insight-driven operations, a public
entrepreneurship mindset and a cross-agency
commitment to mission productivity. By making
these shifts, leaders can support flourishing
societies, safe, secure nations and economic vitality
for taxpayers in a digital world— delivering public
service for the future.
5
ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015
Workforce Reimagined:
Governing at the intersection of
humans and machines
The push for digital services for taxpayers
accelerates the need for human-machine
collaboration. From advances in natural interfaces
to wearable devices and smart machines, revenue
agencies have increasing opportunities to empower
their workforce through technology.
Revenue agencies are today working side by side
with intelligent technology. Within the New
Zealand Inland Revenue and Australian Tax Office,
call center employees are using voice recognition
software to authenticate callers. Introduced in New
Zealand in 2012, the biometrics service has reduced
average call resolution times by one minute as
employees no longer have to ask questions to
verify a caller’s identity if they have registered with
the service. Approximately 2.5 million customers
contact the New Zealand Inland Revenue on a
regular basis of whom 1 million have registered for
the new service6
.
Delivering public service for the future
As these trends show, revenue agencies can
harness the new wave of digital technologies to
support the shift to more personalized services.
Building a digital ecosystem with taxpayers, third
parties, and other agencies and governments
enables agencies to increase collaboration and data
sharing, reduce the burden on the taxpayer and
increase compliance.
By placing themselves at the center of the digital
ecosystem, revenue agencies can take the next step
in delivering public service for the future to provide
taxpayers with the services they want.

6. METHODOLOGY
REFERENCES
Every year, the Technology Vision team collaborates
with Accenture Research to pinpoint the emerging
IT developments that will have the greatest impact
on companies, government agencies, and other
organizations in the next three to five years. The
research process this year began with gathering
inputs from the Technology Vision External
Advisory Board, a group comprising of more than
two dozen executives and entrepreneurs from the
public and private sectors, academia, venture
capital and startup companies. In addition, the
Technology Vision team conducted nearly 100
interviews with technology luminaries, industry
experts and Accenture business leaders. The team
also tapped into the vast pool of knowledge and
innovative ideas from professionals across
Accenture, using Accenture’s collaboration
technologies and a crowdsourcing approach to
launch and run an online contest to uncover the
most interesting emerging technology themes.
Over 1,700 participants actively engaged in the
contest, contributing valuable ideas and voting on
others’ inputs.
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Survey Demographics
This year, Accenture conducted the first Technology
Vision survey, polling 2,000 business and
technology executives— including 162 public
service leaders— across nine countries and 10
industries, in order to understand key technology
challenges as well as priority investments. The
goals: to understand their perspectives on key
technology challenges they face, and to identify
their priority investments over the next few years.
Copyright © 2015 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
This survey was fielded from December 2014
through January 2015 in Australia, Brazil, China,
France, Germany, India, South Africa, the United
Kingdom and the United States. Respondents
included IT Directors (24 percent), Function Heads
(15 percent), CTOs or Chief Mobility Officers (13
percent), CIOs or Directors of Technology (13
percent), CMOs (9 percent), Line of Business Heads
(9 percent) and CSOs (4 percent).
To learn more and read the full Accenture
Technology Vision 2015 report, please go to
accenture.com/technologyvision.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting,
technology services and outsourcing company,
with approximately 319,000 people serving clients
in more than 120 countries. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities
across all industries and business functions, and
extensive research on the world’s most successful
companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to
help them become high-performance businesses
and governments. The company generated net
revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year
ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.
#techvision2015
1 Accenture Technology Vision 2015: “Digital Business Era: Stretch Your Boundaries”
2 Accenture “Transforming Revenue Agencies: Evolving Digital Strategies to Meet Taxpayer Expectations”
3 http://www.ird.govt.nz/transformation/about-business-transformation/
4 Accenture Research
5 Revenu Québec, “Mandatory Billing in the Restaurant Sector:
www.revenuquebec.ca/en/entreprises/obligationsparticulieres/restauration/default.aspx
6 http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/546287/inland_revenue_department_nz_talks_voice_biometrics/