Department of Revenue: One Organization
Our agency continues to develop a strategic leadership system that helps our busy leaders tap into their most valuable resource - their employees - to improve business results.
This system, which is a business management system similar to those used by successful private corporations, helps our agency organize around core and business processes to provide better service to our customers. It is helping us understand how everyone in our agency works together as one team, one organization.
Our agency has separate programs to carry out the jobs the Legislature has asked us to do: collect and distribute state taxes, collect and distribute child support, and oversee Florida’s property taxes. These three operational programs have historically worked and solved problems independently of each other. We also have two agency-wide support programs - Information Services and Administrative Services - which help the operational programs achieve their missions.
The lines between the programs, which always seemed distinct, are no longer so obvious. This is because of what we are learning by identifying, defining, and managing by business process through our strategic leadership system.
Working together on the development of this system has helped us learn that our operational program areas - Child Support Enforcement, Property Tax Administration, and General Tax Administration - face many of the same challenges, and that some business processes occur in more than one program.
Some of our programs’ common challenges are:
- Providing effective customer service with limited resources.
- Meeting customer demand for electronic services.
- Using technology cost-effectively.
- Adapting to evolving business practices and computer systems.
Employees in different programs work on different tasks for different goals, but go through the same steps. Some of our common processes are:
- Customer call center
- Contract management
- Customer address tracking
- Information management
- Electronic filing and payment services
- Collections and distribution
- Employee training
- Mail distribution
By identifying our common processes and using our strategic leadership system to operate more efficiently, we can meet our customers’ needs in the following ways:
- We work together to find solutions to problems.
- We become more effective by sharing knowledge, expertise, and best practices. We save taxpayers’ money by avoiding duplicative efforts and benefiting from "economies of scale." Economies of scale result when the cost of producing an additional unit of output decreases as the volume of output increases.
- We save time by sharing certain kinds of information, rather than each program acquiring and maintaining information independently.
Currently, there are a number of collaborative projects taking place across programs.
Collaborative projects
At the Department of Revenue, we are truly striving to be one agency in how we serve our customers.
The General Tax Administration Program now shares verified address information for employers with the Child Support Enforcement Program; Child Support Enforcement formerly entered the information into its system manually.
All programs are working together on an agency-wide method for rule development.
Child Support Enforcement and General Tax Administration are improving call center performance and developing standard measures for call centers.
General Tax Administration is assisting Child Support Enforcement in developing a data warehouse. All programs are involved in planning a centralized imaging system for incoming mail.
Child Support Enforcement, General Tax Administration, and the Information Services Programs will use the same software system to perform the agency’s core business functions.
Agency-wide teams are improving the processes for employee evaluation, recognition, and procurement.