French Revenue Agency: Online Tax Filing System

The Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFIP, formerly DGI, Direction Générale des Impôts) belongs to the French Ministry of Budget, Public Accounting and Public Service and collects taxpayer income tax returns on behalf of the Government of France. In 2002, DGFIP teamed with Accenture to launch an Internet-based income tax return filing service. Successful results led to the development of a larger, multi-year technology solution based on a large-scale, highly flexible and secure service-oriented architecture. The solution today allows taxpayers to easily and securely file taxes online while helping more than 80,000 DGFIP agents work more effectively.

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The Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFIP) needed to increase its effectiveness by simplifying and improving the relationship between the agency and its taxpayers. In 2002 it launched an Internet-based income tax return filing service, one of France’s most visible electronic administration projects. The project’s initial success led DGFIP to continue the program to dramatically increase the volume of tax returns processed. By 2009, DGFIP planned to process nine million taxpayer returns in a two-month period at a rate of 50,000 taxpayer returns per hour during peak periods.

Accenture teamed with DGFIP for a four-year effort to design, build and deliver a new platform that could help DGFIP meet its goal, and progress to high performance. The new platform provides several Web applications that allow taxpayers to easily and securely file taxes online, improve the efficiency of 80,000 DGFIP agents and complement revenue-income tax return capabilities as well as those for simplified fiscal accounts.

Accenture helped develop a large-scale, highly flexible and secure service-oriented architecture for this mission-critical government project. 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 DGFIP delivered a service-oriented architecture implementation based on open source solutions compliant with interoperability standards from the Web Services Interoperability Organization and which used innovative technologies such as Dependency Injection, Plain Old Java Objects and Aspect Oriented Programming.

The solution Accenture built supports multiple computer configurations by detecting technical information from individual taxpayers’ computer systems. Generic reusable services for public key infrastructure and digital signature were implemented as global assets. More than 80 terabytes of 34 million citizens’ personal data are securely accessed through personal digital-certificate authentication.

The resulting solution enabled DGFIP to process 9.6 million tax forms in 2009. During peak periods the system smoothly managed 24 million pages per day. The average taxpayer return is processed in about 30 minutes and involves cryptographic operations for digital signature on the client and server side.

Accenture successfully contributed to high performance by implementing a robust, secure service-oriented architecture. Accenture’s teaming with DGFIP yielded contributions to improve performance related to productivity, flexibility, security, availability and visibility.

Regarding productivity, the engagement enabled short delivery cycles through extensive use of continuous integration and delivery-process rationalization. (Agile development was accomplished with extreme programming methodologies and tools).

Flexibility was enabled through an easily scalable, generic architecture, including a service-oriented architecture implementation based on open source (back end: Spring, Hibernate, JaxB, Axis; front end: Spring MVC, Struts, DisplayTag, Tiles, Ajax: DWR; and security: Bouncycastle, XML-security).

Security was enhanced through strong mutual authentication and digital certification—and a high-speed, high-quality transactional digital-signature Web service—while high availability was made possible via automatic backup switchover and regulation mechanisms that protected the platform, resulting in a service-level agreement with 99.99 percent uptime.

Visibility was attained because DGFIP’s best-of-breed framework implementation was used as the Accenture reference for worldwide J2EE conferences (JavaOne, JavaPolis, Spring One). Finally, Accenture helped DGFIP achieve its goal of high-volume usage of the Internet-based income tax filing service, with 9.6 million users filling their income tax return online in 2009.

This achievement made the project a European reference for income tax return filing applications and represented a major milestone for DGFIP on its journey to high performance.

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