HMRC Introduces Enterprise Tax Management Platform for Agile Tax Administration

Standard SAP helps cut the cost of Stamp Duty IT on the new, simplified infrastructure

The Situation

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the UK tax agency, is simplifying and standardising its complex IT estate. As part of a department-wide IT transformation to deliver Aspire contract savings of £110m a year, Capgemini delivered over 60 projects, from server removals to a major system merger and re-platforming project. One of the projects was to implement a new SAP Enterprise Tax Management Platform (ETMP) for all customer-facing tax systems, and migrate Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) onto it.

The Solution

The IT transformation programme provided the cost reduction business case to replace legacy SAP systems with a strategic ETMP. The first phase was to migrate finance and accounting systems which had been outside the standard
SAP ERP application. The next phase was to establish a shared infrastructure for SAP applications, and move the consolidated ERP solution onto it. With the ETMP infrastructure for all SAP applications in place, the old, heavily customised SDLT application was replaced with a standard SAP Tax Revenue Management-based application, and moved onto it.

The Result

Stamp Duty is the first tax regime on HMRC’s customer-facing strategic tax platform, which is a key milestone for HMRC’s rationalised IT landscape. The new SDLT technology reduces IT running costs by over £2 million a year, and it is now easier to ensure individuals and businesses who buy and sell more than one property are paying the right amount of tax. The complex transition went precisely to plan, ensuring the safe running of a system that helped support property transactions worth £279 billion in 2010/11, and which contributed £6 billion of tax to the UK economy.