When Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) needed to streamline the administration of a part of the UK's taxation system, they turned to IST's specialist software engineering skills for help.

HMRC is the principal tax administration and collection service of the United Kingdom government.  Most individuals pay their income tax through the Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) system whereby the employer deducts tax directly from their pay then remits the tax directly to HMRC.

The amount to be deducted is controlled by an individually assigned Tax Code which is calculated by HMRC and supplied to the employer for administration.

Customer feedback had highlighted many issues with the existing service and HMRC needed to provide a better alternative for for employers to get their employee's tax codes online. HMRC decided that a desktop application, hosted on the user's own system and interfacing securely to the HMRC systems over the Internet, would meet customer needs and provide the most flexible, cost-effective solution.

IST was commissioned to design, build and deliver the new application, the PAYE Desktop Viewer (PDV).

The requirement was for a cross-platform application which could be downloaded by employers or agents and which would operate on a Windows PC, an Apple Macintosh, or a Linux system.  The PDV  is particularly targeted at companies and organizations that handle larger volumes of notices but do not use third party software packages that can handle their tax notices. Naturally, the application had to be secure, straightforward to use and robust in the hands of many thousands of users.

Over a period of several months the application was developed, eventually being trialled with a group of HMRC staff and volunteer users in testing designed to produce 'real-world' feedback to help hone the design and usability of the software. Initial trials were conducted with the downloadable application being hosted at IST's secure data centre. Responses from customers over the course of testing each iteration of the software was universally positive with users telling HMRC how easy the application was to use and how it would make running their payroll more efficient.

Claire McKenzie, HMRC Project Manager for the PDV project said "This was a challenging project, as HMRC had not undertaken to supply user applications in this way before.  However, it was a pleasure to work with the IST team on the PDV project and to capitalise on their experience in building this type of application."

Andy Lovell, IST's Director of Engineering, commented "Meeting HMRC's cost, timescale and quality targets was a challenge, but one that we were able to tackle successfully.  It's particularly important to be able to deliver a true cross-platform solution which doesn't restrict the end-user's choice of computer platform." 

Not only did the PDV need to cover multiple platforms – many flavours of Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh, it also needed to meet several other strict requirements. This included the ability to maintain a robust local database capable of doing fast searches across tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of records, the ability to talk with secure government servers and for the software to follow full accessibility standards, allowing blind or partially sighted users to use the software on any desktop environment. Given these requirements, IST chose Java, a mature and industry proven technology, as the implementation platform. For the database, the Apache Derby embedded database was chosen. A capable and lightweight solution that is also bundled with the latest Sun development kits as 'Java DB', it has proved an ideal choice for the task.

The Java technology platform provides support for secure communications which is required for handling confidential taxpayer data. Also, Java technology provides excellent support for accessibility in applications.

For the package installer, IST selected InstallAnywhere from Acresso – the industry leading installation software package. This provided a well supported suite of installers for all the target platforms and met the strict accessibility requirements.

As the target audience for the PDV included users who were familiar with the web access to HMRC's Data Provisioning Service, the PDV has been designed to complement and provide a familiar interface to those services. The PDV extends the support to provide powerful search capability across a local database that potentially can contain records over many years for several employers.

If you would like to know more look at HMRC's Employer Bulletin, the PDV Download Page or contact our Sales Desk (email: sales@ist-inc.com).