The Eswatini Revenue Service is happy to announce the successful cut-over into Oracle Revenue Management and Billing System on the 4th March 2024. The cutover marked the completion of Release 1 of the Integrated Revenue Administration System project launched in October 2022. The scope of Release 1 included the delivery of basic functionality to support the tax value chain and data migration to enable the retirement of the old system. Release 2 and 3 shall lay the foundation for functionality that shall take the ERS closer to full digitalization of tax operations.

Prior to starting the procurement for the IRAS, the ERS set out to identify the digital ambitions for tax operations by defining the TO-BE state of the tax value chain (Registration, filing, payment, accounting, audit, collections as well as objections and appeals). Further, the digital ambitions were influenced by the OECD’s Tax Administration 3.0. The digital ambitions are aligned to the strategic goal to improve voluntary compliance by enhancing customer experience, digitalization of business processes and adoption of data driven decision making.

The clarity in the tax digital ambition simplified the procurement process. The functional specifications in the tender document focused on the expected outcomes that the system was expected to deliver. The idea was to leave the detailed module by module functionality to the consultants to collect release by release, enabling the much-needed agility in the project implementation. This required the vendor to propose a highlight configurable solution and have depth in tax operations.

The success of our Release 1 comes as a result of strong collaboration with other Revenue Administrations that include members of CATA. The ERS therefore would like to thank all key stakeholders that contributed directly and indirectly to the project.