Corporate report

HMRC IT strategy: 2022 to 2025

Published 6 July 2023

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) Chief Digital and Information Officer’s (CDIO) Group partners with business areas across HMRC to drive optimisation and innovation to meet the department’s dynamic policy needs.

CDIO’s increasingly product-centric and platform-based capabilities will enable a world-class customer and colleague experience using secure, modern and flexible technology.

Foreword

Leading the way on digitalisation

HMRC has come a long way over recent years. We have much to be proud of in terms of how we’ve shifted services online as part of the government’s wider digital agenda.

Our IT strategy will help us to protect key live services for our customers and colleagues, modernise our IT estate, get the best deals for the taxpayer, and give us better access to new technology as it comes along.

I want leaders across HMRC’s technology function to be able to make decisions with our vision in mind and be thinking about everything they do and whether it’s moving us in the right direction.

Daljit Rehal, Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO)

Transforming the way we work

In line with HMRC’s strategic priorities, at CDIO Group we are in the middle of a multi-year journey to transform how technology delivers value for HMRC, our customers and our partners.

We are working closely with policy and operational colleagues across HMRC to build strategic roadmaps for our critical enterprise platforms and co-create capabilities that HMRC needs for the future. We are transforming the way in which we work and collaborate across our internal and external supply chain, to be more agile to business needs while being resilient to macroeconomic and technological change.

My team and I are committed to enabling technology as the beating heart of HMRC – Making Tax Digital, administering our taxation and customs regime efficiently, and delivering a seamless experience for our customers and colleagues.

Tom Skalycz, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief Digital and Information Officer’s Group

Accelerating outcomes for our customers

HMRC has clear strategic objectives and technology acts as a key enabler and accelerator to these. External trends, such as the use of AI to detect tax fraud or digital identity to make it easier for taxpayers to engage with HMRC, are further increasing the importance of ‘getting technology right’ for HMRC as an organisation.

CDIO is unequivocal in our aim to help everyone across HMRC deliver on our joint strategic objectives. We want technology to be an accelerator for HMRC – to enable us to realise our vision to be a trusted, modern tax and customs department.

This is why we have developed the IT strategy for HMRC – one that starts with our customers - the taxpayers and businesses - and our colleagues at the heart,  truly focused on delivering an integrated experience for everyone.

Our 5 strategic objectives and how we will deliver on them through leveraging technology

Collect the right tax and pay out the right financial support

Enact tax policy and legislation through scalable digital platforms that enable the business to get things right and to do things quickly.

Make HMRC a great place to work

Provide tools that maximise employee collaboration, enhance their experience through user-centred design, and support desired ways of working (for example, hybrid working).

Maintain taxpayers’ consent through fair treatment and protect society from harm

Use automation, self-service and other platform technologies which are secure by design to build a trusted, single view of taxpayers, with informed consent and the right controls to ensure data privacy, security, integrity, authenticity and fair use across HMRC (and other government departments).

Make it easy to get tax right and hard to bend or break the rules

Automate data insight to improve tax yield and provide simple means to interact with HMRC digitally, delivering a total experience approach for customers, agents and businesses.

Support wider government economic aims

Support wider government economic aims through resilient borders and agile tax administration systems.

Improve HMRC’s ability to deliver

We are focused on giving our teams across the organisation more control over our digital service offerings to customers, making them easier to adapt and evolve, and base decisions on real-time data. All the while, we are making sure the platforms they sit on are modern, reliable and flexible – to meet our customers’ needs for the future.

What HMRC will do for customers

We will ensure that we provide the technology capabilities that let customers access the HMRC products and services they need. We recognise that technology can be a key enabler and accelerator for customer outcomes, however making effective use of technology can be hard. We require business expertise and perspective to understand the benefits and customers’ needs and wants, but we also require the technical expertise to understand software and how best to use it.

In order to best act on this, we are changing the way we  are organised internally in HMRC and how we work with our customers – taxpayers, businesses and agents. We will be customer-centric by design and collaborate with our teams across the organisation to deliver faster and more efficient services that meet these customers’ needs, at a lower cost to the taxpayer.

At the heart of this way of working is the promise that CDIO will deliver technology capabilities to enable and support business outcomes through platforms and products.

Products

Products will be owned jointly by CDIO and business areas. They represent a collection of business capabilities delivered in a coherent value stream to our internal or external customers, through underlying platforms. The benefit of products is that real business outcomes are jointly owned by CDIO and the business, and we can decide how best to deliver services for our customers.

Platforms

Platforms are a collection of reusable, modular and composable technology capabilities, comprising one or more technology tools or solutions. These allow CDIO to provide the technology backbone for HMRC’s multiple business needs in a very scalable and cost-efficient manner.

By providing ‘evergreen as a service’ platforms, with IT software and hardware that’s always up-to-date, we will enable new solutions and products to be built rapidly, created without a dependency on highly technical niche skills. We are putting teams in the driving seat to make decisions on products. We will become more agile and more impactful to serve our customers’ needs, whilst driving scale and efficiencies.

Making technology work for our customers

We have a simple goal: making technology work for every one of our customers.

Essentially that means that wherever a business or a capability requires technology to achieve its full impact, HMRC will ensure that technology delivers on this promise.

And of course, over time what we need to meet the government’s objectives is going to change, sometimes at short notice – HMRC will remain adaptable and forward thinking, making sure we are not just providing coverage for the business capabilities of today. We will set ourselves up in a way that the technologies we use can easily be adjusted and configured to work for whatever the business needs tomorrow – as quickly and with the least amount of disruption as possible.

To deliver on this aim we are going to follow 6 simple principles that make sure that we make technology work for all our customers.

Platform approach

We are building platforms iteratively and incrementally. Core platforms to deliver the business capabilities, supported by the enabling platforms. This will include low/no code platforms that enable non-IT colleagues to create business applications.

World-class solutions

We are improving our ability to adapt and scale to meet our customers’  needs today and for the future by deploying world-class technologies for enterprise resource planning, case management and IT service management.

Data-driven decision making

We will enable data insight-led decision-making for tax and customs administration through trusted, quality, consolidated data with robust controls to govern and manage it. This will be augmented with the ethical use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Seamless integration

We are improving how information flows across the business through seamless integration across our existing technology assets. This will help build new capabilities and services at pace, thereby improving efficiency with rationalisation.

Strategic adoption of cloud

We are leveraging cloud capabilities across our IT estate to improve agility, drive innovation and cost efficiency, and improve resilience, interoperability and security of our technology assets.

Building our capability

We’re creating an environment for our talent to thrive in one of the most advanced digital functions in government. Our diverse teams learn new skills and get to put them to the test to solve large-scale challenges with cutting-edge technology.

Making it real

When we in HMRC work together as one, great things happen. There are plenty of examples in our recent past, as well as countless opportunities for the future. CDIO is empowering our business colleagues with platforms that they can configure and products built through our centres of excellence.

Customer services

Our existing virtual assistant platform was not able to meet all our customers’ needs. CDIO ensured we were getting the best out of our technology to improve customer engagement and omnichannel experience.

We introduced voice-based communication for all our customers, driving more than £5m cost avoidance on COVID-19 schemes and improved customer satisfaction scores. We are investigating capabilities to scale further across the enterprise.

Borders and Trade

There were major changes to the customs system as part of the UK’s transtion out of the EU.

CDIO worked to find solutions for agreements, made by using cross-functional teams, working through series of parallel workstreams and towards future state policy implementation. At the same time we moved from an over 30 year old critical national infrastructure solution to a modern, cloud-hosted Customs Declaration System. This supports businesses by helping them clear goods without delay.

Customer compliance

There was a rapid need to be met around COVID-19 support schemes (for example furlough, sick pay and Eat Out to Help Out) which required compliance management.

CDIO and HMRC collaborated to set up risking and case management regimes very quickly, launching in less than 6 weeks. A solution was created for first time point of principle for compliance. The system was designed to route transactional customer data into the risking platform at the point of receipt.

Valuation Office Agency

We are implementing a geospatial platform, transforming legacy tools, utilising cloud and low code/no code technologies.

The delivery organisation for Valuation Office Agency was consolidated with the CDIO Group, leveraging enterprise capabilities, improving the reliability and quality of services. Cross-functional collaboration has enabled increased transparency, trust and maturity in investment of effort and resources for technology change.

Customer Strategy and Tax Design

The HMRC intranet needed modernisation and re-platforming, delivered through a joint cross-functional team across multiple disciplines including workplace, security and Customer Strategy and Tax Design.

CDIO and Customer Strategy and Tax Design are working together on enterprise solutions for other business areas of HMRC, towards a product-oriented model for the common platforms, with clear decision making to deliver the change roadmap.

Contact us

For more details on HMRC IT Strategy, please email the Chief Digital Technology Officer, CDIO HMRC

Chief Digital Technology Officer, CDIO HMRC
7 & 8 Wellington Place
Leeds LS1 4A