Integration

Croatian Tax Administration - New-and-improved application system

Client

“Croatian Tax Administration (CTA) has realized a project “Technical assistance for development new applications of Information System of Tax Administration”. Introducing the new CTA applications had a strong positive impact in further institutional and administrative strengthening of Tax administration in the implementation of EU legislation in taxation field and provided better quality and faster e-services to taxpayers and Croatian citizens. The development of the eight new applications in our Information System was very challenging but with the joint effort of colleagues from CTA and IT partner CROZ result became as we expected. Once again it has been proven that EU projects and EU funding can help tax administrations to modernize and upgrade current legacy systems.”

— Gordana Marić, Assistant Director General of the Tax Administration for Application Solution and ICT System Development

Case study

Project initiative started when CTA recognized the need to build new application modules and upgrade existing application modules, including user interface modernization. All modules have to fit with existing information system seamlessly which means all these modules need to be integrated with the existing legacy system. Project resulted in creating useful new functionalities and upgrading existing services. It improved e-services provided to end users (taxpayers) and it significantly sped up the work of Croatian Tax Administration’s employees enabling increased efficiency in performing everyday business tasks.

The project was awarded to CROZ under Transition Facility instrument/funds by European Union. The overall value of the project was 898,798.00 EUR, 90% of which is financed by the EU-Transition Facility Programme and 10% of the resources came from national financing. The project was delivered in close cooperation with APIS IT who manages information system for CTA.

Several application modules were developed and/or improved during the project:

Application for Document Management
Application for Tax Violation Department
Application for Tax Certificates Issuing
Application for Risk Analysis
Unique Taxpayers’ Database
Application for Tax Enforcements (Bankruptcy and Liquidation Proceedings)
Application for Taxpayers’ Accounting
Application for VAT database – Residents and Non-residents

The project was huge and rather complex technically. Existing legacy system is a 20+ years old monolithic application (Cobol, PL/I, CICS, Db2, zOS…). In order to provide interaction between business sub-domains, and fulfill very specific requirements related to auditability, CROZ implemented Event Sourcing architecture by using Axon Framework. Additionally, completely new API layer was built to provide integration of new modules and reusing the business logic of existing modules. Integration layer was implemented using IBM API Connect, IBM Integration Bus and IBM DataPower. All new applications were deployed into the private cloud environment based on Red Hat OpenShift platform.