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AWARDS & RECOGNITION

2005 Awards: Communications Infrastructure

WINNER:
North Carolina
Taxpayer Assistance & Collection Center

The North Carolina Taxpayer Assistance and Collection Center (TACC) was implemented in October 2003 as a joint project between the North Carolina Department of Revenue (DOR) and the North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services (ITS). The purpose of this project was to implement a centralized taxpayer telecommunications service center that would serve as the main gateway for interaction between DOR and the citizens of North Carolina and was part of an overall Project Tax Collect initiative to increase the tax collection revenues for the state.

"The call center project represents the best of the best with regard to shared services. The Department of Revenue took the lead in the application component and Information Technology Services helped provide the infrastructure. In addition, the call center is located in a rural part of the state, so the project advances economic development in a depressed area as well as providing excellent service to the taxpayers of North Carolina."
E. Norris Tolson, Secretary of Revenue, State of North Carolina Prior to the implementation, the answer rate for incoming calls was, at best, 25% with extended wait times. Today, the answer rate is 90%+, except during peak filing periods. Many calls are handled by an IVR system without agent interaction. The TACC also implemented a predictive dialer that allows for the automated outbound dialing of phone numbers for collection purposes without agent interaction until contact is made. This has greatly reduced the amount of time spent by collection agents in manually dialing numbers and making no contact.

The TACC is a major component of the collection initiatives implemented by DOR over the past four years, which has resulted in nearly $1 billion of "new" revenue for the state. In the first full fiscal year of operations, the TACC collected nearly $46 million, answered 651,854 calls from taxpayers, and had operating expenditures of less than $2 million. The IVR also handled 1.5 million calls during that time.

Funds used to implement the TACC and its continuing operations are paid from receipts (fees) charged to taxpayers who fail to pay their tax obligation in a timely manner. No general tax revenue was used for the implementation of the project or its on-going operational costs.

The technology utilized by ITS for this initiative laid the foundation for the implementation of an enterprise service that today is being offered to all state agencies. The enterprise nature of the technology allows agencies to provide call processing functions to their organization that they normally would not be able to afford by leveraging the benefits of centralized call processing and still maintaining agency identity to the citizens.

OTHER NOMINATIONS:
Click on the link to download program submission.

Arkansas
AlertXpress

Montana
Discovering Montana's Business Entity Annual Report Service

Nevada
Communications Steering Committee

Utah
Wireless Integrated Network

Virginia
Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership & Virginia Optical Research Technology Exchange

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