Steve Lamey, chief information officer at HM Revenue and
Customs, has set out his plans for removing major inefficiencies in
processes, dealing with poor-quality data and updating ageing
technology at one of the government's biggest
departments.
Lamey said that among his top priorities was setting "killer"
key performance indicators - for example, to ensure that the
Revenue stops sending out 30 million letters a year to the wrong
addresses.
He wants to cleanse data to eradicate duplicate or incorrect
files on taxpayers and to streamline and unify business processes
so that, for example, the 72 tax offices manage self-assessment
forms in a consistent way. At present, each office has its own
business processes.
Lamey also wants to improve ways to collect unpaid tax, which
has been estimated at £30bn to £50bn a year, and discourage the
civil service from paying senior staff according to how much they
have to spend and how many staff the department employs.
A further key task is to modernise systems, which he said were
fragmented, complex and unreliable.
All this must be accomplished while pushing through the merger
of two of the government's largest departments and making
efficiency savings as part of the government's plan to cut £21bn
from Whitehall's running costs by 2008.
Lamey's frank assessment of the state of the tax department's
processes and systems is a rare and fresh approach for a senior
government official. MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, the
House of Commons public spending watchdog, have often criticised
government CIOs for being defensive, and willing to propound only
good news.
Lamey joined Inland Revenue last September from a private sector
culture in which CIOs are not afraid to articulate the scale of an
organisation's problems and tasks.
He told the Government IT summit last week that it had taken him
more than three months to discover how many letters were sent out.
Officials had been unaware that 35% of the 90 million letters sent
out each year were returned.
He also found that millions of self-assessment forms are dealt
with so quickly that about 48% are processed incorrectly the first
time and need to be reworked.
"If we could get more right up-front, that would be a good
efficiency benefit. That is one of the real targets we are
currently working on."
Improving the accuracy of tax data is a particular
challenge.
"Clean data - that is my biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest
challenge. If I could get the data clean in our organisations so
that many millions of people have not got multiple entries [of
names and addresses, for example], we can do much less reworking.
Reworking is a real killer."
Lamey added that he was struck by the lack of significant key
performance indictors in the public sector and within his
department, which will be among the first weaknesses he
tackles.
CV: Steve Lamey
Steve Lamey was CIO and vice-president of information management
at British Gas.
He says he has spent a significant part of his career being
responsible for improving the business processes of organisations
as well as IT.
At HM Revenue and Customs he is the organisation's first CIO and
has a much wider remit than IT. He is a board director and chairs a
business improvement board, which gives him a role in saving money
and improving efficiency by helping to change the way staff
work.
"I am not just a CIO," he said. "I think most CIOs in the
private sector have a wider range of jobs than just looking after
IT."