NetPlus Contributions to the Inland Revenue The Company
The Inland Revenue is a government body responsible, amongst other things, for the administration of direct taxes, national insurance contributions and tax credits in the United Kingdom. The Contributions Agency (CA) merged with the Inland Revenue in 1999 to become the National Insurance Contributions Agency (NICO). NICO has over 4,600 staff and is responsible for maintaining over 65 million National Insurance accounts, dealing with 1.4 million employers, 3 million self-employed and 5.7 million personal pension accounts on an annual basis.
Back in 1995 NICO developed 3 DataEase DOS applications to handle some of their core business processes, namely:
- Deferment Registry - to register and process Class 4 requests from Self Employed Customers, and track the movement of cases.
- Central Payments Database - to keep a record of payments received from centrally paying Employers, and reconcile against the End of Year Returns.
- Central Payments Index - a file tracking system.
These applications were accessed by up to 50 users to handle hundreds of thousands of records on a daily basis.
The Challenge
When NICO became part of the Inland Revenue they had to change their existing systems to comply with the new infrastructure. This meant that NICO had to change all their applications to run under Windows NT 4, be networked and year 2000 compliant. And most importantly all applications had to be Intranet based, i.e. accessed via a browser.
According to Lee Hope, NICO's IT Requirements Systems Analyst, "Although our DOS applications were tried and trusted, robust and allowed for dynamic operation, DOS software was becoming obsolete and didn't comply with the new requirements. These applications had to be migrated to a new Windows system."
The Solution
NICO approached EDS (Electronic Data Systems), Inland Revenue's contracted IT services supplier, to help them find a suitable migration route. EDS in turn commissioned Sapphire, the authors of DataEase, to propose and deliver a new solution. According to Lee, "NetPlus was chosen on the basis that the systems would use Browser technology, future proofing the applications regardless of the infrastructure. This proved to be a big plus to the department, as we would be dispensing with additional hardware costs and future requirements to upgrade the product over a longer period."
Sapphire was then responsible for re-creating these three systems in NetPlus using its inherent thin client development and deployment tools. Many changes were introduced such as look and feel, accessibility (remote shared browsing instead of standalone access) and scalability (use of SQL database as opposed to proprietary database engine). Gary Hood, Sapphire's Project Manager responsible for the conversion adds: the move to a client server environment allied with the use of Crystal Reports greatly improved the performance of the application and allowed multi-user access across the board. The applications gained an up-to-date look and feel and were now accessed seamlessly via a Web browser.
The outcome
As well as meeting the new compliance requirements imposed by the merged infrastructure, the new NetPlus system has enabled NICO to future proof their applications and has saved them additional hardware costs. It has also provided them with faster responses (reports that used to take a couple of hours to run are now displayed almost immediately).
Lee comments "The new system has proved to be a big plus to the department and there are plans to expand on the number of users for Deferment Registry. Their feedback is good and since the implementation of these systems we have also undergone enhancements to Central Payments. Sapphire has always been willing to oblige in additional changes. By working together we have been able to achieve a good and sustainable environment."