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ieTaxguard breaks the £50 tax return barrier

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16th Mar 2007
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Peterborough-based tax processing house ieTaxguard has launched a tax return outsourcing service that promises to deliver completed returns to clients for a cost of £48. John Stokdyk reports.

Using a collection of the latest technologies and the services of an outsourcing partner in India, the firm is able to complete 97% of its own clients' returns (around 8,000) by the end of October, explained ieTaxguard business integration director Shaun Crozier. It is seeking to boost its throughput by taking in tax return work from other accountants during the subsequent three months.

"We've shown that we can hit our targets for two years running, so now we're looking to expand our outsourcing work," Crozier said.

As he demonstrated in a previous AccountingWEB case study, Crozier is a technology buff who is always looking for new techniques he can apply to the business. The ieTaxguard technology model is based on running Digita's Taxability Pro software alongside an in-house developed client relationship management system, both of which are made available to the Indian team via Citrix terminal server systems.

"No data is transferred to India, it sends an image to them, as they type it sends keystrokes and mouse movements back to server," explained ieTaxguard's Alam Robinson to an audience at Digita's user conference this week.

The latest innovation, however, is an intelligent character recognition system that can identify documents as they come in and "asset strip" them of data that it then uses to populate the tax program and CRM workflow system.

To demonstrate the ICR system, Robinson fed four sample documents into the software: two pensions statements, a P60 and a marketing form indicating services the client was interested in .

The system seeks out common information types such as address details, UTRs, and national insurance numbers, which it converts into XML data that is exported to the client processing applications, where details are logged into the tax database and the information received checklist is updated.

Having identified the marketing questionnaire and interpreted its contents, the software generated an action in the CRM system for someone to contact the client about inheritance and stock broking work.

When the ICR software cannot interpret something, it flags the anomaly up in a window for human verification. "We won't get 100% of the data as the software may not be able to cope with clients' handwriting, but we're aiming to get 80% of our documents through automatically," said Robinson.

The £48 price quoted by ieTaxguard covers the full return completion and information chasing process, but the firm said it was willing to be flexible in how it served other accountants and tax agents. "If they want us to handle post, we can receive it via a post box, scan it and return it, or strip it and store the information electronically which we send back to update their tax system," Robinson said.

"We are looking to develop a portal which will enable you to have real time view of the current state of clients, and their missing information, if any. We can either chase them for you with your headed paper, or give you the information to do it yourself - whatever service you benefit from most. The whole point of this is to give you back time."

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By AnonymousUser
19th Mar 2007 17:39

sounds to good to be true......
... and it probably is

maybe i'm missign something ...but completing tax returns is a doddle,

getting all the info. from the client is the major problem ... i cant see that happening at bargain-basement fees

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