Revenue

The Office of Revenue Commissioners (Ireland) Commits to Actian Ingres Database

Highlights

The Office of the Revenue Commissioners (“Revenue”) is responsible for the assessment and collection of taxes and duties in the Republic of Ireland. As such, it plays a broad and vital role in the Irish economy. In addition to collecting and administering almost all government-imposed taxes and duties (Exchequer Returns were c. €33 billion in 2009), Revenue is also responsible for the enforcement of import and export controls and the national administration of various European Union schemes, such as the exchange of VAT information between member states. It also carries out collection work for a number of other Irish government departments.

As a public facing government institution, administering all personal and business taxes in the country, Revenue requires high availability and high performance for its missioncritical computer systems. It adopted the Ingres database and the OpenROAD application development toolset in 1993 and has constantly upgraded to the latest versions to ensure a stable, manageable, and economical platform.

This platform is used for Revenue’s primary back-office and public facing systems – respectively its Integrated Taxation Services and Revenue Online Services. It also underpins case tracking and contact management systems, the Revenue data warehouse and third party developed systems for Customs and Excise. These Ingres-based applications have scaled and performed well to support Revenue’s business strategy during periods of sustained growth (the Celtic Tiger years) and the recent global economic contraction. Technical changes such as Revenue’s move to the Java standard and its adoption of a SOA approach were also seamlessly accommodated.

Revenue has recently completed the migration to the latest open source version of Ingres for its core systems, with a resulting uplift in application performance and the availability of a richer feature set.

Challenge

Revenue has many databases in multiple Ingres installations, all of which support mission-critical applications either in production or at various stages of development. It was essential to have minimal downtime during the upgrade and to ensure that all applications, especially its largescale batch applications, continued to run smoothly.

“We simply cannot afford to be off the air,” said John Barron, Revenue’s CTO. “We undertook a series of exhaustive tests to lay the foundations for a smooth migration. During the tests, we received great support from the engineering and management teams at Ingres, whose rapid resolution of issues was essential to the success of the project.”

Solution

Revenue’s upgrade enables the organization to leverage improvements in performance and efficiency. Applications are now better positioned for further growth and run on a well-supported, highly-available and agile database, with emerging community contributions feeding into the Enterprise edition.

Revenue has also benefited from the open source business model and more cost-efficient subscription terms. “We have renegotiated our maintenance and support contract and have achieved 25% savings,” explained Barron. “Because of improved performance, we have also saved on operational and maintenance costs and expect to achieve further savings here.”

As well as its traditional transaction processing requirements, Revenue’s business model also demands increased use of business intelligence and analytics. Ability to link with a range of existing open and closed source packages, as well as ongoing technical developments such as Ingres VectorWise, have given Revenue confidence that the product will continue to evolve to meet its needs in this field.

Taken together, its Ingres-powered applications have provided Revenue with an industrial strength platform to meet its business requirements. These include a move to mandatory e-filing and e-paying for a large percentage of its customer base, where already 75% of Income Tax/Corporation Tax and nearly 100% of Customs transactions take place on-line. Its systems can readily cater for the residual paper tax returns, some 6 million items of correspondence, 3.6 million telephone inquiries, and 750,000 walk-in callers that the organization deals with each year.