Inspiration is the seed of excellence
Inspiration is the seed of excellence. But to make a real difference in public service, managers must turn moments of inspiration into systematic process improvements:
Step 1 – Surface and recognize employees' good ideas.
Step 2 – Expand outstanding insights into best practices, then spread the best practices throughout the organization to raise overall performance.
Step 3 – Leverage advanced technology to multiply the power of the best practice and drive radical leaps forward in business results.
To see how this works in practice, consider DOR Senior Tax Specialist Mike Whatley. A former Navy electronics technician who studied accounting at Brevard Community College, Mike is one of several DOR employees interested in using computers to tackle a difficult challenge – data matching.
For years, tax administrators have known that we can administer tax law more fairly and uniformly if we can find better ways to match varied sets of data. Tax law ought to be the same for everyone – and everyone ought to comply. Tax cheats not only shift the tax burden to others, but also gain a significant competitive advantage over competitors who obey the law.
For example, state law requires businesses to pay tax on the rental of commercial office space. Yet winnowing actionable data on tax compliance out of the huge mass of property tax and sales tax data is like hunting for a needle in a haystack – but harder, more like finding several thousand needles in a peninsula full of haystacks.
Mike found a way to easily match property-tax and sales tax registration data. His contributions helped the DOR Brevard County staff conduct a countywide review of whether businesses were paying sales tax on rental of commercial office space. Other employees also made valued contributions to the data-match issue. With Service Center Manager Kathie Spivey's support, Mike's work earned him a Davis Productivity Award in 2003. That was Step 1 – and it's where some organizations would have stopped.
Spotting the project's promise, Jim Evers, General Tax Administration director, and Carmen Rosamonda, regional manager of GTA's Central Region, launched Step 2. A statewide review of commercial rental tax compliance began during the 2003 tax amnesty program to help taxpayers come into compliance at the lowest cost. Using improved data-matching techniques, DOR was able to identify about 44,000 businesses that may not have complied with the commercial-rental tax law. DOR urged these businesses to determine if they had complied with tax law. Thousands of businesses came forward and paid more than $30 million in tax, penalty, and interest, and millions more will be paid in future years. DOR believes this year-long effort has significantly improved uniform compliance in this area of tax law.
Step 3 involved DOR's powerful new System for Unified Taxation, or SUNTAX. SUNTAX includes an advanced data-warehouse system capable of data matching on a near-industrial scale. Building on the commercial-rental effort, SUNTAX data matching now is helping DOR match tax return and payment information with data about state licenses, corporate registrations, credit reports, bond-rating reports, etc.
The data-mining system is helping DOR reengineer its process for identifying noncompliance with tax law. SUNTAX is giving DOR staff leads for compliance review, reducing uncoordinated research efforts and making agents more productive. During this fiscal year, DOR will launch efforts to improve tax compliance in the convenience-store industry. Other initiatives will follow.
These efforts not only will produce revenue that is due to the state by law, they will help move Florida closer to an ideal that DOR has worked toward ever since it was created – fairer tax administration. Business success should go to the most effective entrepreneur – not the cleverest tax cheat.
