After the Crisis: How Revenue Agencies are Achieving High Performance

This Accenture report examines the future of revenue agencies in a post-crisis globalized world—exploring new challenges these agencies face and the steps they must take to deliver high performance.

It identifies five key actions to help develop an efficient, effective operating model for the new environment, one that empowers agencies to do more with their limited resources. It also provides examples of revenue agencies around the world that are already taking steps to advance in the journey to high performance.

The financial crisis has changed the game, creating a new normal in the global economy that all nations need to respond to. Far from reversing the trend toward a more integrated global economy, the crisis has served to deepen it; hastening the shift in relative economic power while making nations more interdependent than before.

Many nations find themselves facing long-term structural budget deficits as a result of the crisis, others have grown in relative strength but find themselves faced with more difficult trading conditions. In either case, the environment has changed and the role of the revenue agency has become even more important.

In this difficult environment, revenue agencies cannot succeed by operating with a “business-as-usual” approach. Improving yield, reducing the tax gap and ensuring long-term revenue streams are vital if revenue agencies are to deliver the income nations need in an environment in which revenue capture is more difficult than ever.

But this alone is not enough; revenue agencies need to play a wider role in making the nation competitive and supporting national success, all of which must be delivered on a sustainable cost base.

Accenture’s research has identified five actions that will be essential for revenue agencies as they respond to new challenges in the post-crisis world:

• Develop data analytics to power an agile, insightful operating model.
• Use detailed customer segmentation.
• Focus on customer service and the customer journey.
• Work in partnership.
• Undertake sophisticated risk modeling and real-time risk-based processing.

National success requires a revenue system that aids integration with the global economy and a revenue agency that plays a broad role in supporting a range of outcomes. For revenue agencies this means, first and foremost, an operating model that improves yield and reduces the tax gap—and does so on a sustainable cost base.

Executing successfully requires a movement away from conventional audit toward an agile, insightful operating model that places data and intelligence at the heart of the business. These five actions provide the underpinnings of this new operating model.