Revenue bodies around the world continue to seek opportunities to reduce the costs of tax administration as part of the broader effort to improve the efficiency of the public sector. Revenue bodies aim to do this while maintaining, or improving, high standards of service delivery to the community.

In today’s dynamic and technology-savvy society, citizens demand improved government services that meet their expectations – easy to use and accessible anytime and anywhere. Many revenue bodies, including the Australian Taxation Office, are taking steps to transform taxpayer services by offering contemporary and tailored digital self-services that make it easier to comply with tax obligations. Our challenge is to do this while continuing to improve productivity and reduce costs across whole-of-government service delivery.

Two significant and contradictory forces influence the way today’s tax administrations operate: fiscal tightening resulting in declining budgets and rising taxpayer expectations. As citizens increasingly use digital technologies in their everyday lives, revenue bodies are putting in place digital service delivery strategies to move taxpayers to digital channels and self-serve. Despite setting service objectives to make taxpayers more digitally selfsufficient, revenue bodies continue to experience high demand for services in their traditional, more expensive channels, such as in-person and inbound call channels.

The project “Increasing taxpayers’ use of self-service channels” continues the Forum of Administration (“FTA”) series of studies focused on service delivery of revenue bodies from the OECD country members. It explores approaches and specific initiatives that the revenue bodies undertook to increase the use of selfservice channels. The focus is also on the support provided to tax intermediaries to move to self-help and influence their clients to do the same.

This chapter introduces the proposed framework for the evolution of digital selfservice. The framework was initially presented at the TSG conference in Helsinki in September 2013 to inform the scope, intent and objectives of the project on “Increasing taxpayers’ use of self-service channels”. Annex A shows the proposed framework.

The purpose of Chapter 3 is to build an understanding of the broader service delivery environment in which revenue bodies operate and administer tax systems and identify trends, patterns and common characteristics in their approaches to service delivery. To do so, the chapter explores the aggregated survey responses submitted by the revenue bodies, together with additional information collected in the process of exploratory conversations.

The purpose of Chapter 4 is to set out the findings of a detailed analysis of initiatives reported by the revenue bodies. The results of the analysis are grouped under the following elements: 1) monitoring and understanding service demand, 2) user-centred service design, 3) purposeful implementation and driving take up of self-service, and 4) effective channel management.

The framework for the evolution of self-service was introduced in Chapter 2 and it has been used throughout the report to position key findings and case studies relative to the stages in self-service and the corresponding service experience. In this chapter, the framework has been updated to bring together the key findings discussed in Chapter 4 and, in particular, position the 4E model in the context of the stages of self-service.