French Revenue Agency: Service-oriented Architecture

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The French Revenue Agency (Direction Générale des Impôts, or DGI) is part of the French Finance Ministry and collects taxpayer declarations on behalf of the Government of France.

Accenture helped DGI institute service-oriented architecture to create a large-scale, flexible and secure platform for the electronic submission of tax returns.

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DGI needed to increase its effectiveness by simplifying and improving the relationship between the agency and taxpayers. In 2002, it launched an Internet-based tax declaration service that received 117,000 declarations in its first year, making the electronic service one of France’s most visible electronic administration projects. Given the initial success, the agency began a program that would make it possible to increase dramatically the volume of tax declarations it could process. Its goal? By 2007, Direction Générale des Impôts planned to process seven million taxpayer declarations in two-months at a rate of 50,000 taxpayer declarations per hour during peak periods.

Accenture helped develop a large-scale, highly flexible and secure service-oriented architecture for this critical government project to enable taxpayers to complete tax returns online easily and securely.

Accenture teamed with Direction Générale des Impôts in a four-year effort to design, build and deliver a new platform as part of the Adonis 2 project. This project provides several Web applications that allow taxpayers to securely (and easily) file taxes online, helping the 80,000 Direction Générale des Impôts agents to do their jobs more effectively.

To create an adaptable, heterogeneous IT environment to support taxpayers, Accenture mixed professional open source and closed source software components and, as part of the architectural design, implemented more than 500 application servers. Accenture and Direction Générale des Impôts delivered a service-oriented architecture implementation based on open source solutions compliant with interoperability standards from the Web Services Interoperability Organization and used innovative technologies such as Dependency Injection, Plain Old Java Objects, and Aspect Oriented Programming.

Accenture successfully contributed to high performance through implementing a robust, secure service-oriented architecture, improving productivity, flexibility, security, availability and visibility. Regarding productivity, the engagement enable short delivery cycles through extensive use of continuous integration and delivery-process rationalization. Flexibility was enabled through an easily scalable, generic architecture, including a service-oriented architecture implementation based on open source. Security was enhanced through strong mutual authentication and digital certification.

Visibility was attained because DGI’s best-of-breed framework implementation was harnessed as the Accenture reference for worldwide J2EE conferences (JavaOne, JavaPolis, Spring One). Finally, Accenture helped Direction Générale des Impôts realize its goal of high-volume usage of the Internet-based tax declaration service, with 7.3 million users declaring income online in 2007. This represented a major success for both parties, and made the project a European reference for tax-declaration applications.