In December 2020, the Tax Administration of Ecuador began a digital reengineering process in the framework of its Improvement Program. The focus of the program revolves around the need to strengthen the integration scheme between the different processes and information systems, promoting coverage and opportunity, in compliance with the constitutional principles that govern the Ecuadorian tax regime.

The improvement program, through its portfolio of projects, seeks the optimization of the different processes and institutional information systems to handle, manage and control taxes and tax benefits, which results in better management at the service of all Ecuadorians and will increase collection through greater voluntary compliance with tax obligations.

The portfolio of improvement projects of the SRI includes the implementation of the Register and obligations and Benefits Manager Systems carried out on December 31, 2020.  The Cadaster and manager of Obligations and benefits systems replaced 5 essential applications for the management of the Internal Revenue Service: RUC, personal maintenance, Global Matrix, Fiscal Vector and Tax Status, which were developed in 2001 under an old technology. The new applications align with the evolution of tax administration processes with the inclusion of new concepts and functionalities, under the following approach:

• Systems developed in new technology, easy to use for internal and external users.

• Integration of information into a single repository, which will allow finding the subject’s information in a single source for the control processes.

• Increase of subjects in the Tax Registry. It will consolidate in a single system all information on the taxpayer, coming from other applications or processes of the Tax Administration for easy handling and use of the information. (Information migration)

• Automatic integration of subject information with internal and external sources, which will allow obtaining expanded and consistent information from the subject.

• Automatic generation of obligations to subjects.

• Parameterization of states and compliance criteria: filing and payment obligations, which will identify the fulfillment of the obligations of the taxpayer.

• Automatic identification of tax beneficiaries for those entitled to a tax refund.

• Control of obligations in tax status to all taxpayers registered in the SRI.

• Automatic allocation of tax obligations for expanded information in the tax Registry and crosses of personal information of the subject and third parties to improve control processes.

• Implementation of new online services for citizenship: online registration of individuals.

For the implementation of the new applications, a phase of migration and coexistence was contemplated from 24 to 31 December 2020, considering that the data stored, and object of migration were around 170 million.

The migration of databases to a new state-of-the-art computer system constitutes a historic progress in the management of the institution and will allow to offer a more agile service to the taxpayer both in the reception and in the attention of their formalities.  This migration constitutes the most relevant digital reengineering in the institutional trajectory, which will allow, among other things, to take on the challenges arising from the country’s inclusion in the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.

This reengineering process involved the temporary unavailability of online services and electronic processes of the SRI, as well as the web portal www.sri.gob.ec however, we implemented a set of measures of mitigation, ensuring proper care to the taxpayer and the continuity of the institutional management, in order to preserve the due process and the right to defense in all of the administrative tax processes by the Internal Revenue Service.

This migration is the longest and most complex change in the technological environment of SRI since its inception. Its development and implementation took almost three years. The production start-up covered approximately 200 continuous hours, 390 production steps were executed and involved the participation of a team of at least 50 people who worked in 8-hour shifts.

This important change revealed two key aspects:

• The maturity of the technological processes implemented in the institution, which allowed facing confidently the great challenge that represented a change of this magnitude.

• That the involvement of technical personnel with knowledge in the various tax processes, allowed reducing the implementation times and certification tests of this complex and large-scale project.

Since the launch of the new system, on January 01, 2021, more than 162,000 tax returns have been received on our institutional portal. It is important to note that on January 5, 2021 alone (expiration day) we received more than 95,000 returns, significantly higher than the seventy thousand returns that the SRI usually receives on a normal expiration day.

In addition, nearly 1,700 new registrations have been generated in the RUC; more than 6,600 updates have been processed; and approximately 49,000 tax certificates have been generated. All this on our electronic portal “SRI online”, starting from January 01 this year.

The digital reengineering of the Internal Revenue Service was scheduled from December 24, 2020 to January 1, 2021; however, as a result of a technical and exhaustive work by the SRI team, we could complete the migration of databases prior to the expected deadline, with our web portals www.sri.gob.ec and transactional “SRI on-Line”, totally available and enabled from 1 January 2021.

The Internal Revenue Service has not stopped promoting its management and action, observing the constitutional principles that govern the public administration, mainly those of efficiency, effectiveness, and quality.

Digital reengineering is an effort of the Tax Administration to ensure transparency and the efficient use of the available data, moving towards a technological transformation and the harmonization of processes with technology services in an era where the technological media have a major role in the interaction with taxpayers.

Our digital reengineering constituted a complex process; however, it was born from the need to optimize our applications to provide a better service to citizens even more when, in the circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic, it is required to guarantee access to optimal systems that allow the voluntary fulfillment of obligations.

Once we have completed this migration, we can safely say that we have taken a historic step in the SRI, a necessary and indispensable action in the modernization of the Ecuadorian Tax Administration.

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